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THE RETURN JOURNEY A Delta Book PUBLISHING HISTORY Delacorte Press hardcover edition published March 1998

Dell mass market edition published June 1999

Delta Trade Paperback edition / June 2007

Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved Copyright © 1998 by Maeve Binchy Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97052624

Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33767-6

www.bantamdell.com v1.0

To dearest Gordon

With all my love

Gina

Mother darling,

It’s even more green and beautiful than you said. Having a really wonderful time. Will write soon. Keep well and happy.

Gina

Freda, The card I sent yesterday was for the neighbors. Or rather for you and your paranoia about the neighbors. Anyway its purpose was that it could be left around and looked at, spied on, and inspected by them. The truth is that the place is a shambles, it’s raining so hard I can’t see whether it’s green or yellow. The truth is that I still feel hurt and unhappy and not at all like writing letters. The truth is that I must care about you a great deal, otherwise why am I letting that call from the airport get to me so badly? I believed you when you said you’d watch for the mail. I will write, but just now there’s nothing to say.

Try not to worry about what people think and say. Honestly, they aren’t thinking and saying much about us at all. They have their own problems.

Gina

Darling Gina, You called me Freda instead of Mom. I wondered about that for a long while. I suppose it means you’re growing up, growing away. I told myself it meant you liked me more, thought of me as an equal, a friend. Then I told myself that it meant you liked me less, that you were distancing yourself.

For someone who claims there is nothing to say, you sure have a lot to say. You say I am paranoid about the neighbors. Well, let me tell you that Mrs. Franks came in to say she couldn’t help reading your nice postcard and wasn’t it wonderful that Gina was having such a good time. So! Do they look or do they not?

You say that you are upset by the call from Kennedy Airport. It was you who called me, Gina. I just said write me often. You are the one who was crying, I was the one who says what any normal mother says to a daughter traveling abroad…going to Europe. I said, I’d like it if you wrote to me, is that so emotionally draining? Does it deserve the lecture, the sermon…the order not to live my life by other people’s dictates?

But I only say all this so that you’ll know I’m still me, still the same prickly jumpy thin-skinned mother I always was. I like you to call me Freda.

Don’t stop now because you think I’ve taken it and run with it, that I’ve read into it more than there is. And don’t stop writing to me, Gina. You know I didn’t want you to go to Ireland. But I did say…I always said it was an unreasonable feeling on my part. There are so many things I want to hear about Ireland, and so many I don’t.

I think I want you to tell me that it’s beautiful and sad and that I did the only possible thing by leaving it. And leaving it so finally. I think that’s what I want you to say in your letters. And when you come home. I love you, Gina, if that’s not too draining.

Freda

I’m calling you nothing in this letter in case we get another long analysis. I had an odd day today. I left the B and B, which is fine, small room, small house, nice woman, kept telling me about her son in Boston who’s an Illegal. I thought she meant the IRA, but she meant working in a bar without a proper visa or a green card. Anyway I was walking down the street, small houses , hundreds of kids roaming round when school’s out, the country is like a big school playground in many ways. And I saw a bus. It said “Dunglass.” It was half full. I put out my hand. And it stopped. I asked the driver “Where is Dunglass?” And he told me…. But I said isn’t Dunglass not a house, a big house. He said no, it was a town. Mom, why didn’t you tell me it was a town? What else did you not tell me? I got off the bus. I told him I had changed my mind.

Back at the B and B the woman was happy.

She had heard from her son the Illegal. It was cold in Boston, lots of ice and snow. I asked her about Dunglass. She said it was a village. She said it was a nice kind of a place, quiet, peaceful but not a place to go in the middle of winter. It would scald your heart, she said. Why didn’t you say it was a village that would scald your heart? Why did you let me think for years that it was a big old house with Dunglass on the gate. You even told me what it meant. Dun a fort and Glass meaning Green.

That much is true, I checked. But what else is?

Gina

Gina my love,

I wish you’d call. I tried to get a number for you, but they don’t do street listings like we do. It’s five days since you wrote. It will be five days until you get this, ten days could have changed everything.

You may have been there by now, for all I know.

I never told you it was a house. Never. Our house didn’t have a name that’s all, it was a big house, it did have gates, it was the biggest house in Dunglass, which wasn’t saying anything great. I just didn’t talk about any of it. There are things in your life we don’t go over and over. Go see Dunglass, go on a day when there is light and even watery winter sunshine. Go on a day when you might be able to walk down by the lake. Go see the house. Your grandmother is dead and in the churchyard on the hill. There is no one who will know you. But tell people if you want to. Tell them your mother came from Dunglass and left it. I don’t think you will tell them. You are always saying that most people are not remotely interested in the lives and doings of others.

I love you and I will tell you anything you want to know.

Your mother Freda, in case you have forgotten my name.

Freda, Stop playing silly games. And let us stop having an argument by mail. Yes, I will go to Dunglass.

When I’m ready.

And don’t talk to me about my grandmother.

She was never allowed to be a grandmother to me.

Her name was not spoken to me, I got no letters, no presents…there were no pictures of me in a Grannie’s Brag Book on this side of the Atlantic.

The woman who lies in the churchyard on the hill is your mother. That’s the relationship. You might as well face it. Her name was Mrs. Hayes. That’s all I know. You were Freda Hayes, so my grannie was Mrs. Hayes. Don’t lecture me, Freda, about forgetting your name, you never even told me hers.

Gina

Dear Gina, I have begun this letter twelve times, this is the thirteenth attempt, I will send it no matter what.

Her name was Annabel. She was tall and straight.

She walked as if she owned Dunglass. And in a way she did. It was her family who had the big house. My father married in, as they say. I never knew why they sent me away to boarding school, why they made me leave such a lovely home. Peggy who looked after me used to whisper about rows, and ornaments being broken, but I couldn’t believe that my dad could be like Peggy said he was, two men, one man sober and another man drunk.

Everyone admired my mother, because she ran the place. Even after my father went away she never asked for sympathy. She was cold, Gina, she made herself cold and hard. She used to say to me that we didn’t need their sympathy, their pity. We needed only their admiration. Perhaps some of that has rubbed off on me, perhaps I care too much about people thinking well of me, rather than being natural. She had only one daughter, as I have. We could have been more alike than I ever realized. I can’t write any more. I love you. I wish you were here.

Or I were there. No, I don’t wish I were there, I can never go to Dunglass. But I want you to go and to get some peace and some of your history from it.

Freda

Dear Freda, Thanks for your letter. I think I’ll cool it a bit on all the emotion. Don’t forget I have Italian blood as well. The mix is too heady. I could explode. The days are getting brighter, I’ve been to Wicklow a lot, it’s so beautiful…and I went farther south, Wexford…the riverbank is like something from a movie…and Waterford. The Illegal is home from Boston, his name is Shay. He is very funny about Boston, but I think he wasn’t happy there, he says his dream is to have a little cottage in Wicklow, and write songs. It’s not a bad dream. I have no dreams really.

I’m doing an extramural course in the university about Irish history. It was full of dreams. I’ll give you the telephone number in case you’re lonely and sad. But don’t call just far talking. It’s very artificial.

Shay says that when he and his mother used to talk, they both put the phone down feeling like hell. We don’t want that, Freda. Now that we’re rubbing along OK. Yes, of course I love you.

Gina

Gina, It was so different then. You can’t imagine. I remember the year I met your father. All right. All right. The year I met Gianni…the man I married.

Does that satisfy you? It seemed like there was nothing but big funerals that year. Brendan Behan died, Sean O’Casey died. And Roger Casement… no, I know he didn’t die then, but his body was brought back to Ireland, that’s when I met Gianni.

I tried to explain it to him. We sat in a café, it was a cold wet day. He was an Italian American. He tried to explain to me about Vietnam. It was 1964.

I told Gianni all about the Irish troops leaving on the peacekeeping mission in Cyprus and I showed him where they were building the new American Embassy. And the Beatles went to America that year…it seems like a hundred years ago.

And Gianni wanted to know where I was from, so I took him home to Dunglass. And Mother laughed at him because he told her how poor his parents had been when they got the boat from Italy.

And I didn’t want to sleep with him, Gina, I was twenty-three like you are now, but in those days we were so different. Not just me…everyone, I promise you. But I hated Mother so much for scorning him. And I despised her for saying that she hadn’t gone through so much just for me to throw myself away on the son of a chambermaid and a hall porter. Gianni had told with pride how his parents, your grandparents, had got these jobs.

And Mother said it in front of Peggy. Just letting Peggy know how little she thought of Peggy’s role in life.

I was glad, Gina, I was glad when I was pregnant, even though I was frightened at the thought of living with Gianni forever. I felt it wouldn’t last, that we didn’t know each other, and that when we did we might be sorry. But we were never sorry, we had you.

And you will admit that, difficult as I have been, and stubborn, I have never said anything bad about your father. He thought he could live in Dunglass and marry in like my father had. But my mother hunted him, and she hunted me too because I wouldn’t stay one minute to listen to her harsh words.

I left my room as it was, my books and letters and papers. I don’t know what happened to them.

Ever. I closed that door and never opened it.

When Gianni left me I didn’t feel as sad as people thought. I knew it would happen. I had my home in America, my daughter, my job in the bookshop, my friends. I may marry again.

I won’t, of course, but I say to myself cheerfully like Peggy used to say it may be a sunny day after all, little Freda. My heart is heavy when I think of Peggy. I didn’t write to her because I didn’t write to the big house, it would have been twisting a knife too harshly into Mother.

Her name was Peggy O’Brien, Gina, they lived in a cottage by the lake. I tried to write after Mother died. But there weren’t any words. You were always good with words, Gina.

Love Freda

This is a postcard of Dunglass village. I bought it in a Dublin shop. Has it changed much, Mother? I’m going there tomorrow. I’ll write and tell you everything. I miss you.

Gina

The time gap is too long. I called you. Shay’s mother told me you were still away. You didn’t say you were taking Shay with you. It’s nearly a quarter of a century since I took Gianni there. Are we going to repeat history all over again? Dunglass hasn’t changed very much. I had forgotten it was so small. I wait to hear anything you may write.

Freda

Dearest Freda, Your letter was cold, there were no dears or darlings or loves anywhere. Are you afraid that like my mother and my grandmother, I will marry hastily the wrong man, who will leave me as happened to you and to Annabel? I went to her grave and I laid a big bunch of spring flowers on it. The countryside is glorious. There were little ducklings on the lake, and moorhens and two big swans.

You never told me any of that. You never told me that you had a pony and that you fell off and broke your arm. You never told me about Peggy’s big soft bosom where I cried like you cried. She bought a lot of your things at the auction. She said she didn’t want strangers picking up your books and your treasures. She called them treasures, Freda, and she has them in a room. Waiting for you to come home and collect them. She was left nothing in the will. It all went to charity. She bought them from her wages because she knew one day you’d come back.

I told her it would probably be in June. When the sun shines long hours over the lake and the roses are all out on her cottage. Not far from the one that Shay and I are looking at with our hearts full of hope.

Send me an open postcard to Shay’s house so that his mother will know how much you and I love each other. See, I am like you after all. I want them to think well of us. In many ways I’m glad you kept it from me, it came as such a rainbow of happiness. But don’t keep it from yourself anymore. There are no ghosts in Dunglass. Only hedges and flowers and your great friends Peggy, Shay, and Gina

Annie checked in early. She had come out to the airport in plenty of time. None of this was going to be a hassle. Once she had taken her boarding card and seen the smart new case trundle off with its little tag telling it to go to London Heathrow, she sighed with relief; it was all happening now, nothing could stop it. She was going to have the luxury of really looking at the things in the duty-free shop for once, and maybe trying out a few of the perfumes on her wrist. She might even look at cameras and watches—not buy, but look.

Alan was late; he was always late checking in. But he had such a nice smile and looked so genuinely apologetic, nobody seemed to mind.

They told him to go straight to the departure gate, and he did—well, more or less. They couldn’t expect him to go through that duty-free without buying a bottle of vodka, could they? He had no sign of fuss or confusion; he slipped onto the plane last, but somebody had to come in last. He settled himself easily into his seat in executive class. With the ease of the frequent traveler, he had stowed his briefcase and vodka neatly above, fastened his safety belt in a way that the air hostess could see it was fastened, and he had opened his copy of Time. Another business trip begun.

Annie smiled with relief when she saw her case on the carousel at London Airport; she always half expected it to be left behind, like she expected the Special Branch men to call her in and ask her business in England and the Customs men to rip the case apart looking for concealed heroin. She was of a fearful nature, but she knew that and said it wasn’t a bad way to be because it led to so many nice surprises when these things didn’t happen. She took her case and went unscathed through Customs.

She followed the signs for the Underground and got onto a train that she thought must be like a lift in the United Nations building: There were people of every nationality under the sun, and all of their suitcases had different little tags. She closed her eyes happily as the train rushed into London.

Alan reached out easily and took his case as it was about to pass by. He helped a family who couldn’t cope with all their cases arriving at once. One by one he swung them off the conveyor belt, and when he took one that wasn’t theirs he just swung it easily back again with no fuss. The woman gave him a very grateful smile. Alan had a way of looking better than other people’s husbands. He bought an Evening Standard in the paper shop and settled himself into a taxi. He had already asked the taxi driver if he could have a receipt at the end of the journey; some of them could be grumpy, always better to say what you want at the start and say it pleasantly. Alan’s motto.

Alan’s secret of success. It was sunset; he looked out briefly at the motorways and the houses with their neat gardens away in the distance. It was nice to be back in London where you didn’t know everyone and everyone didn’t know you.

The train took Annie to Gloucester Road, and she walked with a quick and happy step to the hotel, where she had stayed many times.

The new suitcase was light to carry; it had been expensive, but what the hell—it would last forever. It was so nice, she had bought two of those little suitcase initials and stuck them on. “A.G.” At first she wondered if this was a dead giveaway, wouldn’t people know that they weren’t married if they had different initials? But he had laughed at her and patted her nose, telling her that she was a funny little thing and had a fearful nature. And Annie Grant had agreed and remembered that most people didn’t give a damn about that sort of thing nowadays. Most people.

The taxi took Alan to Knightsbridge and the hotel, where they remembered him or pretended to. He always said his name first, just in case. “Of course, Mr. Green,” the porter said with a smile. “Good to have you with us again.” Alan folded the receipt from the taxi driver into his wallet and followed the porter to the desk; his room reservation was in order.

He made an elegant and flattering remark to the receptionist, which left her patting her hair with pleasure and wondering why the nice ones like Mr. Green didn’t ask you out and the yucky ones slobbered all over you. Alan went up to his room and took a bottle of tonic from the minibar. He noticed it wasn’t slimline, so he put it back and took soda. Alan was careful about everything.

Annie opened her case in the small hotel bedroom where she would spend one night.

She would hang up her dresses to make sure the creases fell out. She would have a bath and use all those nice lotions and bath oils so that they didn’t look brand new tomorrow. The key turned and she lifted the lid. There were no dresses and no shoes. Neither the two new nighties nor the very smart toilet bag with its unfamiliar Guerlain products were in the case.

There were files and boxes and men’s shirts and men’s underpants and socks, and more files. Her heart gave several sharp sideways jumps, each one hurting her breastbone. It had happened as she always knew it would happen one day. She had got the wrong case.

She looked in terror and there were her initials; somebody else called AG had taken her case. “Oh my God,” wept Annie Grant, “oh God, why did you let this happen to me? Why?

I’m not that bad, God. I’m not hurting anyone else.” Her tears fell into the suitcase.

Alan opened his case automatically. He would set his papers out on the large table and hang up his suits. Marie always packed perfectly; he had shown her how at an early stage. Poor Marie had once thought you just bundled things in any old how, but, he had explained reasonably, what was the point of her ironing all those shirts so beautifully if they weren’t to come out looking as immaculate as they went in? He looked at the top layer of the case in disbelief. Dresses, underwear—female underwear neatly folded. Shoes in plastic bags, a flashy-looking sponge bag with some goo from a chemist in it. God almighty, he had taken the wrong case. But he couldn’t have. It had his initials: A.G. He had been thinking that he must get better ones, these were a bit ordinary.

God damn and blast it, why hadn’t he got them at the time? For a wild moment he wondered if this was some kind of joke of Marie’s; she had been very brooding recently and wanting to come on business trips with him. Could she have packed a case for herself? But that was nonsense; these weren’t Marie’s things, these belonged to a stranger. Shit, Alan Green said aloud to himself over and over again. What timing. What perfectly bloody timing to lose his case on this of all trips.

It took Annie a tearful seventy minutes on the telephone and many efforts on the part of the airline and of the hotel to prevent her from going out to the airport before she realized that she would have to wait until the next morning. Soothing people in the hotel and in the airline said that it would certainly be returned the following day. She had only discovered an office address for Mr. Bloody Green, typed neatly and taped inside the lid of the case. An office long closed by now.

Tomorrow, the voices said, as if that were any help. Tomorrow he would have arrived expecting her to be in fine form and to have her things with her. They were going to go for a week’s motoring holiday, the first time she was going to have him totally to herself. He was flying in from New York and would hire a car at Heathrow; he had told his boss the negotiations would take longer, he had told his wife…Who knew or cared what he had told his wife? But he would not be best pleased to spend the first day of their holiday in endless negotiations at the airport looking for her things. Was there no way she could find out where this idiot lived? If she phoned his home, even maybe his wife could tell her where he was staying. That was if his wife knew. If wives ever knew.

It took Alan five minutes to find the right person, the person who told them that there was no right person at this time of night, but to explain the machinery of the morrow. Yes, fine for those who hadn’t arranged a breakfast meeting at seven-thirty A.M ., before the shops were open, before he could get a clean shirt.

And what was the point of a breakfast meeting without his papers? God rot this stupid woman with her cellophane bags and her tissue paper and her never-worn clothes. Her photograph album, for heaven’s sake, and pages and pages of notes, a play of some sort. Hard-to-decipher writing, page after bloody page of it. But there was one page where it revealed the address of Miss Prissy A. Grant, whoever she was, and he was sure she was a Miss, not a Mrs. A letter addressed to her had “Ms.” on it, but Alan had always noted that this was what single, not married, women called themselves. Unfortunately it had no address, or he could have sent for an Irish telephone directory and found her mother and father and got the hotel that their daughter was staying at. That’s if she had told them. Nutty kind of girls who carry photograph albums, unworn clothes, and plays written in small cramped writing probably told their families nothing.

The man who ran the small hotel near Gloucester Road was upset for nice Miss Grant, who often came to spend a night before she went on her long trips to the Continent; she was a teacher, a very polite person always.

He took her a pot of tea and some tomato sandwiches in her room. She cried and thanked him as if he had pulled her onto a life raft.

“Look through his things. You might discover where he is staying,” he advised. Annie was doubtful. Still, as she ate the tomato sandwiches and drained the pot of tea she spread all the papers out on the small bed and read.

She read of the plans that Mr. A. Green had been building up over the last two years. Plans which meant that by tomorrow he should be able to take over an agency for himself. If things went the way he hoped.

Mr. A. Green would return to Dublin at the head of his own company. The arguments were so persuasive that the overseas client would be very foolish not to accept A. Green’s offer.

There were photocopies of letters marked “For Your Eyes Only”…there were files with heavy underlining in thick felt pen, “Do not take to Office.” A great deal of the correspondence was organized so that it showed A. Green’s present employers, the people who were paying for this trip to London, in a very poor light.

Annie sighed; she supposed that this was the world of business. At school you didn’t go plotting against the geography mistress or getting the headmaster to lose confidence in the art teacher. But it seemed a bit sneaky.

Sometimes there were copies of letters his boss was shown pinned to those he had not been shown. It was masterly filing, and if you read the whole anthology, which up to now had presumably been for Alan Green’s eyes only, it made a convincing case. Annie decided that A. Green was a bastard and he deserved to have lost his case and his deal. She hoped he would never find either. But then how would she get back what was hers? And God almighty, suppose he had read her diary.

Alan Green decided to hell with it, he couldn’t bear the flat taste of the soda. He opened a calorie-packed tonic water from his minibar and decided that he would do this thing methodically. Look on it as a business problem. Right. He had left his name with the airline, if she called. Of course she would call.

Stupid girl, why had she not called already?

Stupid A. Grant. She was probably in a wine bar with an equally stupid teacher talking about plays and how to write them in longhand at great length and maximum stupidity.

What kind of play was it, anyway? He began to read it. He read of her romance…. It wasn’t a play, it was the real thing. This was a diary.

It was more than a diary, it was a plan of campaign. It was dozens of different scenarios that could take place on this holiday.

There was the scene where he said he couldn’t see her anymore, that his wife had given him an ultimatum. This creepy A. Grant had written out her lines for that one, several times over. Sometimes they were casual and see-if-I-care. Sometimes they were filled with passion, or threats: she would kill herself, let him wait.

She had written the whole thing out as if it were a play, even with stage directions.

Alan decided that A. Grant was a raving lunatic and that whoever the poor guy she was going to meet was, he deserved to be warned about her.

He felt glad that she had lost this insane checklist of emotional dramas and how to play them; he was glad that all her finery had gone astray and that she would have to meet the guy as she was. He realized that she had probably done some kind of repair job and washed her tights and whatever just as he had washed the collar and cuffs of his shirt and the soles of his socks. Then he remembered with a lurch that she might have read his dossier on the company.

Annie suddenly remembered she hadn’t told the man in the airport where she was staying. She had been too upset. Suppose Mr.

Conniving Green had rung in with his whereabouts; they wouldn’t have been able to contact her. She telephoned them again. Had Mr. Green called? He had. This was his number.

He answered on the second ring. He would come right around with her case. No, please, gentleman’s privilege. Very simple mistake, must be a million AGs in the world. He’d come right away.

He held the taxi. She was quite pretty, he saw to his surprise, soft and fluffy. He sort of remembered seeing her at London Airport and thinking that if she was in the taxi queue he might suggest they share. Remembering the revelations of her diary, he shuddered with relief at his escape. She was surprised to see that he looked so pleasant; she had expected him to look like a fox: sharp-featured, mean pointed little face. He looked normal and nice.

She thought she remembered him on the plane up in executive class laughing with the air hostess.

“I have your case here,” she said. “It’s a bit disarrayed, for want of a better word. I was hunting in it to see if I could find out where you were staying.”

“Yours is a little disarrayed too.” He grinned. “But none of those nice garments you have fitted me, so they’re all safe and sound.”

They grinned at each other almost affectionately.

He looked at her for a moment. It was only eleven o’clock at night; in London that meant the evening was only starting. She was quite lovely in a round soft sort of way….

She wished he didn’t have to go. Maybe if she said something about why not go and let’s have a bottle of wine to celebrate the found suitcases…

She remembered how he had described his boss as bordering on senility and how he had given chapter and verse to prove that the boss was a heavy drinker.

He remembered how she had proposed threatened suicide with attendant letters to some guy’s wife, his children and his colleagues.

They shook hands, and at exactly the same moment they said to each other that they hadn’t read each other’s papers or anything, and at that moment they both knew that they had.

Miss Vogel was surprised that she had never married. Not so much upset as surprised. When she was young everyone thought Victoria Vogel would surely be one of the first in the neighborhood to walk down an aisle.

Fair-haired, soft and pretty, a great homemaker, she even made dresses for herself and her sisters and their friends, as well as baking delicious desserts for any event where good cooking was needed.

The young Miss Vogel had an agreeable manner with everyone; no future mother-in-law would stand in her way, no family would object to the girl who worked pleasantly in her father’s bakery. She was much in demand to dance at the weddings of her many friends, and although she caught the bride’s bouquet on many occasions, it never led to a wedding of her own.

Miss Vogel didn’t look back on her girlhood in New York as a lonely time; she hadn’t yearned always for a beau of her own. She always thought there was one around the next corner. She lived happily over the bakery and didn’t really notice the years go by.

There were so many other things to think about. Like her mother’s illness. The others were all married by the time Miss Vogel’s mother took to her bed, so she did the nursing, which made sense because she lived at home.

And when her mother died and her father became gloomy and lost interest in his work, she had to work all that much harder in the bakery to keep it going. There was a manager, of course, Tony Bari. They spent long hours together trying to see how the bills could be paid, the overheads reduced, and the whole enterprise made sound.

Everyone thought one day they might marry.

Miss Vogel didn’t really think they would, even though she would have been happy had their quick embraces led to a proposal.

But she was a practical woman and realized that Tony Bari was very interested in money and had told her several times that any sensible man in business was looking for a rich wife. Miss Vogel knew she wasn’t in this category, and even though she did like his company, his big broad smile and the way his mustache tickled her cheek, she didn’t weep when he told her he had finally met a lady of property and invited her to his wedding.

Not long after, Miss Vogel’s father went to the hospital, and it was known that he would not come out. Tony Bari bought the business.

His new wife did not think it appropriate that Miss Vogel continue to work and live there, so, at the age of thirty, she was unemployed.

People said Tony Bari had not paid enough, and indeed, after it had been divided between her sisters and brothers there was very little left.

Miss Vogel had nowhere to live, she had no real qualifications to get a good job anywhere, but with her customary good humor she decided to wait until something turned up.

Then she saw a position as a type of janitor or superintendent in a small, new apartment building. A lot of the residents were female, and they had specifically sought a woman super. Miss Vogel, with her calm, pleasant manner, seemed ideal, and she now had a two room apartment, with an address in a fine part of town.

Her friends were pleased for her.

“You’ll meet very classy folk now,” they said.

Miss Vogel didn’t mind whether they were classy or not, just as long as they were nice.

And mainly they were.

She became involved in all their lives. She walked the little yapping dog, unsuitably called Beauty, for Janet, the discontented widow in Number One.

She baby-sat for the teenage daughter of Heather, who was a workaholic advertising supremo in Number Two. She took in the flowers and arranged them for Number Three, where Francesca the attractive mistress of two businessmen lived. Tactfully, Miss Vogel made sure these two gentlemen never coincided on a visit.

She spent a lot of time in Number Four, where Marion sat and looked out the window, sad because her husband came home so rarely.

There were many others in the building whose lives were familiar to Miss Vogel. Her sisters sometimes said these must be rich, spoiled people who lacked nothing in their lives, but Miss Vogel didn’t agree. As she sat in beautifully decorated apartments and drank coffee from a fine china cup or soda from cut crystal glassware, Miss Vogel knew that unease and unhappiness didn’t fly out the window just because you had money. A lot of the people had even more worries than the Vogel family ever had. Sometimes she went past the old bakery where Tony Bari had built a big business with his wife’s money. It was now a delicacies shop, and people faxed in their orders for sandwiches, which were delivered to their offices. Imagine!

There were three children. Miss Vogel watched them grow up. She would have liked to have met them properly and known them, to have been invited into the store where she, too, had lived as a child.

But Tony Bari’s wife never seemed to want her around.

Miss Vogel thought this was sad. She had always been welcoming and kind to the woman who had come to live there only because of her father’s dollars. But then, you couldn’t make people like you if they didn’t.

Her days and nights were never empty or lonely, because of all the people in the apartments. Miss Vogel did not have what anyone would call a great life of her own, but she went through all theirs, their hopes and dreams for Thanksgiving and Christmas, who would come home, where they would be invited, what they would cook. Their diets for the New Year, how many days a week working out at the gym, low-fat foods to be stocked in the freezer. Then she went through their new wardrobes for spring. None seemed to notice Miss Vogel didn’t buy spring clothes, plan to lose ten pounds every January, or discuss where she went for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

She was a listening person, not a talking person.

She was interested in their lives.

Now it was time to talk about vacations.

Janet was going to Arizona with her sister, so naturally there was the matter of Beauty, the bad-tempered little dog, Beauty didn’t like kennels, so perhaps Miss Vogel…

Heather could take only a week and not one day more away from work, so she would fly to Los Angeles. This way, she could fit in one or two meetings on the West Coast as well as take fourteen-year-old Heidi to Disneyland and Universal Studios, so it would be a fantastic holiday for the child. But there was simply no time to get her any vacation clothes. Could Miss Vogel manage…one Saturday morning possibly? Just a quick trip to the department store?

Francesca was going to spend one week with one man and the other with the second man, but she had told each she was going to a health spa for the week she would not be with him. Would Miss Vogel mind very much taking the bus to this town two miles away, where the spa actually was, and mailing two postcards for her? You see, men were so possessive and so suspicious these days, and one didn’t want to do anything silly.

Marion in Number Four was uncharacteristically cheerful because she and her husband were going to a quiet inn—he said he would like time to talk properly. That had to be good, Marion said, vacations were a time when people found new relationships if they had none or cemented an existing one that needed to be patched up.

That was the wonderful thing about vacations, wasn’t it, Marion had said over and over.

Miss Vogel didn’t know. She had never had a vacation. There had never been the opportunity, the money, or the time. And now, at fifty-three, there seemed little point in hoping she would find a new relationship, and there wasn’t an old one to cement.

Tony Bari and his wife and children were going to Italy. Her sisters, brothers, and their families were going to a lake where they rented chalets every year. Nice for the cousins to get to know each other and keep in touch, they said.

None of them ever thought it might be nice for Miss Vogel to get to know them all and keep in touch, too. But then, she would be out of place. An elderly aunt on her own.

All the holidays seemed to come together.

Miss Vogel would have a very empty building to look after. But she enthused about their trips, as she had enthused for so many years about everything they did.

She did all she was asked to do. She studied the feeding schedules of the small, aggressive Beauty to reassure Janet. She took Heidi on an outing to Bloomingdale’s and with Heather’s dollars bought her bright-colored clothes to wear in the California sun. She planned the two bus trips so she could send the deceiving postcards for Francesca. She helped Marion pack romantic negligees for her week in the country inn.

And, of course, she would do all the other things that made them think Miss Vogel was an angel. She would turn out their lights, pull their drapes at different times each evening, sort their mail, so, when they came back, it would be in a neat pile on their hall table. She would see their garments were returned from the dry cleaner and hung in their closets; she would admit a television repairman here and an interior decorator there and listen to their holiday tales and look at their holiday photos with great interest on their return.

Often there was fuss and near hysteria at the actual time of departure; limousines had not been ordered in advance, for example, or taxis could not be hailed on the New York streets.

This year, Miss Vogel decided to cut through all the drama and found a neighborhood car service. She spoke to Frank, a man with a tired, kind face, who was at the desk, telling him she had four trips over two days, to La Guardia Airport for Heather and Heidi, to Grand Central for Janet, to Penn Station for Marion and her husband, and some secret pickup place in New Jersey for Francesca.

“What commission are you looking for?”

Frank asked wearily.

“Oh no,” Miss Vogel said. “I was only trying to arrange something for the people in my building. They’ll all pay you the rate. I don’t want anything…I don’t want anything for myself.”

“You must be the only person in the world who doesn’t, then,” said Frank.

“It’s just their vacations. They get very fussed, you know the way people do?”

“I don’t know the way people do,” Frank said. “I’ve never had a vacation.”

Miss Vogel gave him a big smile. “Do you know neither have I? We must be the only people in the world who haven’t.”

A bond was established between them, and they worked out the times he would be there to pick up the holidaymakers.

He was courteous and punctual, but more than that he was kind. He waited while Janet kissed Beauty good-bye; he told Heidi she’d love Disneyland—everyone came back from it a new person; he explained to Francesca that he was a genius at finding out-of-the-way spots in New Jersey; he told Marion and her husband that an inn in the countryside was the very best vacation anyone could choose.

Miss Vogel was sorry when the last had gone. She enjoyed Frank’s company. She would miss regular visits when she always found time to make him a coffee and give him some of her own home-baked shortbread.

To her surprise, he turned up again.

“I was wondering, Miss Vogel, if you and I should have a vacation in New York,” he began tentatively. “We could pretend we were tourists here and see it through their eyes.” He looked at her, hoping that she would not laugh at this or dismiss it as a ridiculous idea.

“A vacation in New York City?” she said thoughtfully.

“Well, a lot of people do, you know.” Frank was defensive. “I drive them to places. I should know.”

“That will be great,” said Miss Vogel. “But first I have to do a bit of fussing. That’s essential.”

“Yes, I’ll come around tomorrow morning.

Does that give you time enough to fuss?” he asked.

Miss Vogel worked out that she could take a five-hour vacation each day. Then she ironed her clothes carefully and laid out a different outfit for each outing. She went to a beauty parlor on the corner and got her hair and her nails done.

She prepared several picnic lunches they could have and left them ready in the freezer.

She got new heels on her comfortable shoes.

She checked the weather forecast. She was ready for her vacation.

They went to Ellis Island and spent the day looking at where their grandparents had come into the United States from Italy and Germany, Ireland and Sweden.

“I bet they were four young people who never had time for a vacation once they got here,” Miss Vogel said.

“But they must have been adventurous young people,” Frank replied, “not the kind of folk who would like to believe their descendants would be stay-at-homes.”

The next day they went to the World Trade Center to see the view and then back uptown to the zoo. Afterward, they walked in Central Park in the sunshine.

They drove together companionably to the town where they had to mail Francesca’s postcards and talked about how old life was with so many people living a lie—Francesca herself and the two married men who were each taking her off for a week. They went to Chinatown and on a tour of the stock exchange on Wall Street.

They went back to where Miss Vogel grew up and looked at the big delicacies shop, so much changed in appearance since her youth.

They went to see where Frank was raised, changed so very much from when he was a boy. He pointed out where he had lived with his wife for three years a long time ago, and also the hospital where she had died.

Neither had ever been to Carnegie Hall, so they booked a concert.

And as she had seen a ball game only on television, never in reality, they went to Yankee Stadium.

And the week flew by.

Frank helped Miss Vogel to sort the mail, arrange the curtains, and arrange deliveries for the tenants. Miss Vogel went to the car service office and brightened it up by washing the curtains and putting some colorful ornaments around.

The next week, they could no longer afford five hours a day for vacation. Like everyone else in New York, they would now know that feeling which said the holiday was over.

But for Frank and Miss Vogel, there was something new and wonderful. No longer did they keep their thoughts to themselves, there was someone with whom to talk over the events of the day. Not only holiday memories, but what was happening in the real world as well.

So when Frank drove Heather and Heidi back from the airport, he could report that mother and daughter were hardly speaking and that the girl had been left alone in her hotel room looking at television, since Heather was tied up in meetings all day.

Miss Vogel could tell him that something very odd had happened in Francesca’s life—perhaps both men had proposed marriage to her, both would leave their wives, but she wanted neither. Francesca was lying down with a cold compress on her eyes, trying to get the courage to tell them.

Janet told Frank in the car her holiday with her sister had been a huge mistake—there would be no more family get-togethers. What did people want family for, anyway? A good dog was worth twenty sisters.

Marion told Miss Vogel that her rat of a husband had taken her to the inn only to tell her he was leaving her. And amazingly, Marion didn’t really mind all that much. Once it was out in the open, she enjoyed the walking and peace of the countryside, and her husband had been startled and annoyed at how well she adapted to the new situation.

But nobody asked Miss Vogel if she had enjoyed her time when they were away. And if they saw Frank around the place a lot, it was because they assumed he was driving people.

Sometimes Miss Vogel wasn’t quite as available to baby-sit, walk dogs, listen to problems, arrange flowers. Nothing you could put your finger on. And if she looked happier and walked with a spring in her step and smiled with brighter eyes…they thought she might have lost a few pounds or something.

Tony Bari’s wife noticed, however. She had returned from a tedious vacation in Italy with a lot of possessive in-laws and was glad to be back in New York. Her eyes narrowed when Miss Vogel came into the shop. She always suspected Tony Bari harbored feelings for the daughter of the house, and if she had had any money, he would very probably have asked Miss Vogel to marry him.

“Did you have a good vacation, Miss Vogel?” she asked politely, her sharp glance taking in Miss Vogel’s improved posture, hairstyle, and general manner.

“Very pleasant, Mrs. Bari. I stayed in New York, got to know my own city. It was delightful.”

Tony Bari’s wife, who would love to have done the same, was envious.

“Well, at our age, Miss Vogel, we don’t expect very much from vacations, do we?” She was trying to remove the pleased smile from Miss Vogel’s face. But she was not succeeding.

Miss Vogel paused in her choosing of expensive mushrooms, specialty cheese, and exotic olive oils and smiled confidently at the woman who had taken away her only hope of marriage and a home, merely because that woman’s father had money.

“Oh, Mrs. Bari, how sad, how very sad to hear you say that,” she said, as deeply sympathetic as if she were offering condolences at a funeral.

Tony Bari was at the other side of the shop.

He was fat now and balding, his face set in lines of disappointment and greed. Life had not turned out as he might have wished. How could she ever have thought he would have made her a good husband? Had it all worked out at the time, then she would have just returned from a weary journey to Italy with this bad-tempered man. She would have known no other world but this one; she would never have gone in and out of the lives of the existing people who lived in her building.

She might have looked wistfully at the kind face of Frank, a limousine driver, if she had ever met him, and wondered what it would be like to live in easy companionship with someone who saw beauty everywhere and gain and opportunity nowhere. Tonight, for his birthday, she would cook him a great feast. They had plans for the future, plans young people were making all over the world, but were no less loving and hopeful just because Miss Vogel and Frank were no longer young.

“Oh, Mrs. Bari,” she repeated, her voice full of genuine sorrow. She had been about to ask, “What is the point of living at all if we don’t expect something from every vacation and every day?” but it sounded a bit preachy, and Miss Vogel had learned firsthand from her apartment complex that happiness does not always go hand in hand with having a lot of possessions, so instead she said that to have unrealistic dreams should not be part of the aging process.

And head high, her shopping basket full of exotic ingredients, Miss Vogel left the delicacies shop that had once been her father’s bakery and, without a backward glance, walked into the sun-filled streets of New York.

It would be a new start. Not everyone got such a chance, Maura told herself. Three months in a warm climate, and the people were supposed to be very friendly over there.

Already she had got letters from faculty wives welcoming her. James would be visiting lecturer in this small university in the Midwest of America. Both fares were paid and they would have a house on campus.

The only problem was their house. James and Maura lived in a part of Dublin where people suspected burglars of lurking in the well-kept shrubbery, waiting till the owners had left each day. If they were gone for three months, the place would be ransacked.

But it was quite impossible to let the place.

First there was the fear that you might never get the people out. You heard such terrible stories. Then it would mean locking everything away—no, it would be intolerable. How could they enjoy three months in a faraway place terrified that everything they had was being smashed and they might have to go to the High Court to evict the tenants?

There were no possibilities, either, in their families. Ruefully they agreed that James’s mother would be an unlikely starter. She was forgetful to a point where nobody could leave her in charge. The burglar alarm would be ringing night and day, making the neighbors crazy. She did love their dog Jessie, but she would forget to feed her, or else give her all the wrong things. She would allow Jessie out and there would be litters of highly unsatisfactory puppies on the way when they got back.

They couldn’t ask Maura’s sister Geraldine, either, because she hated dogs. She would leap in terror when Jessie gave a perfectly normal greeting. And Maura feared that Geraldine would poke around, look in drawers and things. There would be so much hiding involved, and having to send Jessie to a kennel, that it literally wouldn’t be worth it.

Their neighbors weren’t the kind of people you could give a key to. These were big houses with sizable gardens. Not estates, or back-to-back terraces like Coronation Street, where everyone knew everyone’s business. On one side there were the Greens, elderly, mad about gardening, hardly ever out of their greenhouse. Very pleasant to greet, of course. But that was all. And then, on the other side, there were that high-flying couple, the Hurleys, who were always being written about in the papers.

They had started their own company. They had three children of their own and had adopted others. They had his mother and her father living in a kind of mews. They always seemed to have at least three students of different nationalities living with them and minding the children. You couldn’t ask the Hurleys to take on any more. They’d sicken you with how much they were doing already.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do," Maura heard herself say for the tenth time to James, and saw with alarm that familiar look of irritation cross his face.

“Everything is a problem these days,” he said. “Most people would jump at this opportunity. All it does for us is create more and more difficulties.”

She knew that this was true. Other people would see it as an excitement, a challenge, an adventure. She was being middle-aged beyond her years to see the summer as another Bad Thing. She must pull herself together. This trip to America was probably the last chance she would have to make her marriage work.

They would be together in a new place, sharing everything as they had ten years before.

There would be freedom, there would be time.

James wouldn’t work late at the college there, as he did at home. He wouldn’t stop for drinks at the club rather than coming back to her. He wouldn’t invent things to do on weekends to escape the house and the prospect of yet more time mending, fixing, and titivating their home.

Maura reminded herself that she was resourceful, that that was how she had found James in the beginning, her lecturer in college whom everyone had fancied and yet Maura had won. That was how she had found the house. It was good to be hardworking and practical. That was what had saved them both when little Jamie had died, a cot death at three months. Maura had planted the garden and bought a young collie dog. James had always said that she was a tower of strength in those months.

But that had been six years ago, and things had changed a lot since then. It wasn’t just the lack of a child. They both knew that. There seemed to be a gulf between them that no amount of shared interest would bridge. There were so many things that they did share already—the house, the garden, the walks with Jessie—and yet there were so many silences. Another child, even if it had come along, would not have cemented them together. James lived more and more in the college, Maura more and more in her office, which she didn’t really enjoy, but since the work was routine and simple it gave her plenty of time to think about her home and its constant improvement.

There was something about the frown of impatience on James’s face that made Maura realize the urgency of sorting out the house matter without any more fuss.

“Leave it to me,” she said reassuringly. “I’ll think of something. You have enough to do to prepare your lectures.”

The frown went, and there was something of the old James. “That’s more like it,” he said.

He was very handsome when he smiled. Maura realized with a sudden lurch of feeling that at least three marriages had ended in the college.

It had been shock and horror and scandal at the time, but now all those men had settled down happily with their second choice. The furor had died down except in the hearts of the three women who had been left alone. It could happen with James very, very easily. If someone wanted him desperately enough. If Maura was foolish enough to drive him out of the home with her fussing and creating problems where none existed.

She spent the next day on the phone. Did anyone know anyone? And eventually someone did. An old school friend Maura hadn’t seen for years knew someone called Allie.

“Is she an Arab?” Maura asked. The Hurleys had a boy called Ali staying one year.

“No, it’s short for Alice, I think. She’s a kind of a home sitter.”

“Is she in an organization? Does she get paid?”

The friend, a colorless woman called Patsy, said no, Allie was a law unto herself. “She’s our age, but you’d think she was years younger. She hasn’t anywhere to live, no real job, she just moves on from place to place minding people’s houses.”

“Sounds a bit unreliable,” Maura said disapprovingly.

“No, she was very good here, actually.”

Patsy sounded grudging.

“And what did she do all day?”

“I wish I knew, but she had the place in fine shape when we came back from Brussels.

Everyone around spoke highly of her.” There was still something ungiving about Patsy.

Maura wondered if she was being told the full story about this Allie.

“You didn’t like her, did you?” she asked.

Patsy sounded aggrieved. “Lord almighty, Maura, you asked for someone to mind your house, I found you someone. Did I like her? I hardly met her. I only saw her twice before we left, and once when we came back. She did everything she said she would, and what more can anyone ask?”

Maura thanked her hastily and took Allie’s present phone number. She was minding an art gallery for someone. It would be lovely to go to a home with a dog and a garden, she said.

“And two budgies?” Maura added.

“Super,” said Allie.

She sounded eighteen, not thirty-five-ish.

When they met her, she looked much nearer to eighteen also.

Allie had long, dark, curly hair, the kind you knew she shampooed every morning and just shook it dry. She had a great smile that lit up her whole face, she had long golden legs and arms, and she wore what Maura thought was an overshort denim dress.

Allie sat on the grass as she talked to them in the garden. She smiled up at James, and Maura felt a resentment that she had not known possible. Not just at the fact that Allie could sit on the ground without falling over.

But at the way she looked at James. It wasn’t flirtatious or coy, it was just a look that was full of interest. Everything he said seemed worthy of consideration; Allie would nod eagerly or shake her head. She was reacting on a very high level. Not for Allie the nods and grunts and half-attention that James must have been used to from Maura.

To be fair, and Maura struggled to be fair, Allie seemed very interested in her too. She asked Maura about her job, and even James seemed surprised at some of the things he heard about Maura’s daily routine.

“I didn’t know that,” he said, interested, and Maura realized with a pang that she hardly ever told James anything about work nowadays except to complain about the manager or the difficulty in parking a car or getting any shopping done at lunch hour.

Allie had a big red notebook, and she wrote their names down neatly, and all contact addresses that she would need. She was practical, too, asking about plumbers and electricians, and the number to phone if she smelled gas. She asked them to be sure to put any silver in the bank and to spend a couple of hours assembling all their private papers and documents and to lock them up somewhere.

“We don’t need to do that.” James was smiling that slightly besotted smile men in their late thirties smile, Maura noticed.

“Oh, but you do, James.” Allie was firm.

“You see, I come from having minded dozens of homes; you haven’t. When you are over in America you’ll suddenly remember that you left something out you’d prefer that nobody else saw. This way you’ll know you didn’t.

Also, you can’t ask me to pay your dentist’s bill or find your income tax for you if it’s all locked away, so I’m protecting myself, too.”

Allie had a marvelous laugh; she threw her head back and laughed like a child. She had perfect teeth, and her neck was long and suntanned.

Maura felt herself patting her hair. She was middle-aged, frumpish and settled, in her tights and shoes beside this lovely, leggy thing, all canvas shoes and golden limbs. And if Maura noticed it, then you could be sure that James did.

Allie asked about relations and friends, noted their names and numbers. She wrote down that Maura’s sister didn’t like dogs, and that James’s mother didn’t lock doors behind her. She seemed to understand everything in an instant.

Allie told them that she would write every week and give them an update on everything.

She took instructions about phone messages and redirection of mail.

“Well, wasn’t that the direct intervention of God,” James said when Allie had finally left.

Maura felt that this was both going too far and also ignoring her own part in finding the home sitter.

“Yes, well, and my friend Patsy!” she said mulishly.

“Of course.” He didn’t care about niceties like this. “Isn’t she a treasure?

“She’s exactly what we want,” he said happily. “I didn’t dream that anyone like that existed.”

A cold, hard knot formed in Maura’s stomach. She felt a physical shock, like the feeling you get if you think you’ve swallowed a piece of glass. She realized she must not show her anxiety.

“Yes, she seems terrific, all right.”

“Aren’t you clever?” James said.

Maura could feel the back of her neck get cold and clammy. As she sat in her garden, she knew in a disembodied way that she would remember this moment forever. She knew the time and the date, and the way she sat on the garden seat with her hand stroking the head of Jessie the collie dog. Maura knew, with a certainty that she had never felt before about anything, that Allie was going to bring danger into her life. Real danger, threatening everything she had hoped for.

She had often wondered how women behaved once they knew for certain. But then she supposed few women were possessed of the foresight that she had. Other women had to wait for evidence and proof, or a friend whispering that perhaps she ought to know.

Or worse still, the husband saying there was something he had to tell her.

Maura wondered if it was better to know so far in advance. Did it give her any advantage over the others? Were there any points to be gained in the game of trying to keep James for herself, and resist the siren call of Allie, who had already captured his heart?

It wasn’t a question of competing. Maura had thick, fine, fair hair; she couldn’t grow a mop of dark curls to shake around. Her mouth was small, almost pursed; this had once been thought an advantage, but she couldn’t laugh showing all those pearly teeth as Allie did.

Maura’s legs and arms were white, not long and golden. If it were a straight fight, Allie would have the scepter and the crown. It couldn’t be a straight fight.

They saw her once more before they left—the very morning of the departure. She had brought her own sheets, she told them, and they saw them peeping from a huge straw basket.

“Is that the only luggage you have?” Maura tried hard to stop her voice from sounding like Allie’s mother or her schoolteacher.

Allie dimpled back at her. “I’m a gypsy, you see. I don’t need possessions. I use everybody else’s. I’ll watch your television, look at your clocks, listen to your radio, boil your kettle….

I don’t need to clutter myself up with a lot of things.”

James was listening to this as if it were words from the Book of Revelations. He was also looking at the corner of Allie’s sheets. Pretty blue and pink f lowers with frilly edges on them. Maura knew that her own dull fitted sheets in white and pink were uninviting by comparison.

It had never been difficult to work out James’s thought processes. They were very simple and direct; they went relentlessly from point A to point B.

“We never asked you, Allie, if there is anyone…any friend…boy…man…” He broke off in confusion.

“Allie knows she can invite any friend here.”

Maura was crisp.

“No, I meant…you know.” James looked pathetic; he was dying to know if there was anyone. Maura held her breath, but not with any hope. What she had felt as she sat on that garden seat had not been a suspicion, it had been a foresight. It wasn’t a matter of fearing that this golden girl would destroy Maura’s life. She didn’t just fear it, she knew it.

Allie laughed lightly. “Oh, don’t worry about that, James,” she said. “I’m between lovers at the moment.”

“I’m sure that state won’t last very long.”

He was being gallant, arch. Idiotic.

“You’d be surprised.” The smile was easy.

“I have to wait for the right man.”

Maura knew that Allie would wait three months. The right man, James, was being taken out of the country temporarily, but she would wait and plot and plan for his return.

She wrote every week, addressing the letters to Maura, but this was only a ploy. She talked of long walks on the beach in Killiney throwing the sticks for Jessie, chatting with James’s mother. A remarkable woman for her age, and so interesting about the year she had spent in Africa.

“Poor Mum, delighted with a new audience,” James said.

Allie had contacted Maura’s sister Geraldine; they had, it seemed, been visiting each other a lot. Maura hoped this didn’t mean that Geraldine would be dropping in at all hours when they got back.

Geraldine had been frightened by a dog when she was young; this was where her fear stemmed from.

“I didn’t know that,” James said.

“Neither did I.” Maura was grim.

The visit to the midwestern campus was a sort of success. Only a “sort of,” Maura thought.

There was indeed a chance to get closer.

Evenings on their own. Walks together. None of the pressures of home, no traffic to cope with or talk about, since they lived in the center of everything. No duty calls to people, no telephone ringing except from kind neighbors asking them to drop by for a barbecue or a drink.

But the week seemed to be spent waiting for Allie’s next letter and analyzing the last one.

“Imagine, the Hurleys asked her to dinner," James said.

Maura had noted that too. “Very kind of them. They’re wonderful at looking after strays,” she said. It had been a mistake. James frowned.

“I don’t think you’ll find that they classified our Allie as a stray,” he said.

Maura hated her being called “our Allie.”

She also hated hearing in a letter that old Mrs.

Green was much better now and would be coming home from the hospital soon with a new hip.

“I didn’t know…” James began.

“I didn’t know she had a hip replacement either,” Maura said. “They keep themselves very much to themselves.”

“Not anymore they don’t,” James said tersely.

“Will we send them a card?” Maura sounded tentative.

“You were always the one afraid of drawing them on ourselves.”

“Well, since they’ve been drawn…” She knew her voice sounded sharp.

“Up to you.” He sounded a million miles away. Or a few thousand miles away. Back in that house and garden, in those flowery sheets, on warm terms with the neighbors. Maura felt that cold knot return. Like a flashback in a film, she saw herself sitting with a hand on Jessie’s soft velvet fur.

There was a chill in the warm American evening, and she gave a little shiver.

“Are you all right?” he asked, concerned.

He would always be kind to her, see that she managed as well as possible in the circumstances. She could see into the future, when he would call around once a year to discuss investments, and whether the roof needed to be redone.

But where would he call? She would not give him the house, she would not walk out and let Allie take over that place she had loved and lavished her heart on for ten years.

She would live there alone if need be. Her eyes filled with tears.

“You seem very tense here,” he said kindly.

“If you like, we can get away a little earlier. I mean, I can cram the lectures together a bit towards the end. Be back sooner.”

“What about Allie? She thinks she is staying three months.”

“Oh, she can stay on with us surely? Until she goes to her next place. She’s not a fusser, our Allie.”

Maura said she didn’t feel a bit tense, she simply loved it here, there was no question of going home early. She knew her smile was small and pinched. Without surgery she would never have a broad, open smile like Allie’s.

It was a perfect September day when they got home. Maura rang Allie from the airport.

“How did she sound?” James was eager.

Maura wanted to say that she sounded like an overgrown schoolgirl, laughing and welcoming them back and words tumbling over each other. Instead she said that Allie sounded fine, and that she had arranged a few people to come in. “That was lovely of her.” James smiled happily. “Friends of hers, is it?”

“No, friends of ours, I think,” Maura said.

“We don’t have that many friends,” James said absently.

“Of course we do,” Maura snapped.

Around them in Dublin Airport passengers were being met, embraced, and ferried out to cars. Maura and James pushed their trolley of luggage to a taxi ungreeted.

“We could have been met if we had wanted it,” Maura said in answer to no question.

On their lawn, Allie had set up a table. She had vases of f lowers, and jugs of sangria.

James’s mother was there, helping and feeling as if she were in charge. Geraldine was there with her mute husband Maurice, chatting animatedly to the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Green, and discussing the success of the operation.

The Hurleys were there with their extended family. The children all seemed to know Allie well. Maura had to struggle to remember their names, there were so many of them. A couple from across the road whom Maura and James had never met were among the crowd milling around.

“I do hope we aren’t intruding,” the woman said. “But Allie was so insistent, she said you’d love everyone here.”

“She was utterly right.” Maura strove to put the warmth and enthusiasm into her voice that she knew were called for.

“Have a shower, you must be exhausted.”

Allie had thought of everything.

Maura stood under the water while James shaved at the washbasin nearby.

“What a girl,” he said at least three times.

He was anxious to be back down there joining in the fun. “Wasn’t this a smashing idea of hers?”

Maura’s voice was shaky. “Great,” she said, hoping the running water covered the sound of a sob. “Simply great. You go on down. I’ll be out in a minute.”

She stood in her bedroom and tried to find something that might look festive and happy to wear. She seemed to see only blouses and skirts or matronly dresses that would make her fit into the generation of James’s mother or the Greens.

Allie was leaving that afternoon; she would not stay and destroy Maura’s life by taking her husband. Her next job was abroad. Minding a farmhouse in the Dordogne.

But Maura had been right that day on the garden seat. Allie had ruined her life; she had opened up golden doors and shown everyone else how wonderful things could be, but would never be again. James’s mother would never again be asked to tell long stories about Africa, Geraldine wouldn’t be invited to tell rambling tales of self-pity about barking dogs in her youth. The old Greens would go back into their greenhouse, and the high-flying Hurleys behind their hedge.

The people who lived across the road would never intrude again. James would frown without knowing why, and only Maura would know that nothing would ever be the same.

They met at a Christmas party, and suddenly everything looked bright and full of glitter instead of commercial and tawdry as it had looked some minutes before.

They got on like a house on fire and afterward when they talked about it they wondered about the silly expression. “A house on fire.” It really didn’t mean anything, like two people getting to know each other and discovering more and more things in common. They were the same age, each of them one quarter of a century old. Shane worked in a bank, Moya worked in an insurance office. Shane was from Galway and went home every month. Moya was from Clare and went home every three weeks. Shane’s mother was difficult and wanted him to be a priest. Moya’s father was difficult and had to be told that she was staying in a hostel in Dublin rather than a bedsitter.

Shane played a lot of squash because he was afraid of getting a heart attack or, worse, of getting fat and being passed over when aggressive, lean fellows were promoted. Moya went to a gym twice a week because she wanted to look like Jane Fonda when she grew old and because she wanted to have great stamina for her holidays.

They both loved foreign holidays, and on their first evening out together Shane told all about his trips to Tunisia and Yugoslavia and Sicily. In turn, Moya told her tales of Tangiers, Turkey, and of Cyprus. Alone among their friends they seemed to think that a good foreign holiday was the high spot of the year.

Moya said that most people she knew spent the money on clothes, and Shane complained that in his group it went on cars or drink.

They were soul mates who had met over warm, sparkling wine at a Christmas party where neither of them knew anyone else. It had been written for them in the stars.

When the January brochures came out, Moya and Shane were the first to collect them; they had plastic bags full of them before anyone else had got around to thinking of a holiday. They noted which were the bargains, where were early-season or late-season three-for-the-price-of-two-week holidays. They worked out the jargon.

Attractive flowers cascading down from galleries could mean the place was alive with mosquitoes. Panoramic views of the harbor might mean the hotel was up an unmerciful hill. Simple might mean no plumbing, and sophisticated could suggest all-night discos.

The thing they felt most bitter about was the single-room supplement. It was outrageous to penalize people for being individuals.

Why should travel companies expect that people go off on their holidays two by two like the animals into an ark? And how was it that the general public obeyed them so slavishly? Moya could tell you of people who went on trips with others simply on the basis that they all got their holidays in the first fortnight in June.

Shane said that he knew fellows who went to Spain as friends and came home as enemies because their outing had been on the very same basis. Timing.

But as the months went on and the meetings became more frequent and the choice of holiday that each of them would settle for was gradually narrowed down, they began to realize that this summer they would probably travel together. That it was silly to put off this realization. They had better admit it.

They admitted it easily one evening over a plate of spaghetti.

It had been down to two choices now. The Italian lakes or the island of Crete. And somehow it came to both of them at the same time:

This would be the year they would go to Crete.

The only knotty problem was the matter of the single room.

They were not as yet lovers. They didn’t want to be rushed into it by the expediency of a double booking. They didn’t want it to be put off-limits by the fact of having booked two separate rooms. Shane said that perhaps the most sensible thing would be to book a room with two beds. This had to be stipulated on the booking form. A twin-bedded room. Not a double bed.

Shane and Moya assured each other they were grown-ups.

They could sleep easily in two separate beds, and suppose, just suppose in the fullness of time after mature consideration and based on an equal decision with no one party forcing the other…they wanted to sleep in the same bed…then the facility, however narrow, would be there for them.

They congratulated each other on their maturity and paid the booking deposit. They had agreed on a middle-of-the-road kind of hotel, in one of the resorts that had not yet been totally discovered and destroyed. They had picked June, which they thought would avoid the worst crowds. They each had a savings plan. They knew that this year was going to be the best year in their lives and the holiday would be the first of many taken together all over the world.

The cloud didn’t come over the horizon until March when they were sitting companionably reading a glossy magazine. Shane pointed out a huge suitcase on wheels with a matching smaller suitcase. Weren’t they smashing, he said; a bit pricey, but maybe it would be worth it.

Moya thought she must be looking at the wrong page. Those were the kind of suitcases that Americans bought for going around the world.

Shane thought that Moya couldn’t be looking at the right page; they were just two normal suitcases, but smart and easy to identify on the carousel. Just right for a two-week holiday. But for how many people? Moya wondered wildly; surely the two of them wouldn’t have enough to fill even the smaller suitcase.

Well for one person, me, Shane said with a puzzled look.

Between the two happy young people there was a sudden gray area. Up to now their relationship had been so open and free, but suddenly there were unspoken things hovering in the air. They had told each other that their friends’ romances had failed and even their marriages had rocked because they had never been able to clear the air. Shane and Moya would not be like that. But still, neither one of them seemed able to bring up the subject of the suitcases. The gulf between them was huge.

Yet in other ways they seemed just as happy as before. They went for walks along the pier, they played their squash and went to the gym, they enjoyed each other’s friends, and both of them managed to put the disturbing black cloud about the luggage into the background of their minds. Until April, when another storm came and settled on them.

It was Moya’s birthday, and she unwrapped her gift from Shane, which was a traveling iron. She turned it around and around and examined it in case it was something else disguised as a traveling iron. In the hope that it was something disguised as a traveling iron.

But no, that’s what it was.

It was lovely, she said faintly.

Shane said he knew ladies loved to have something to take the creases out on holidays, and perhaps Moya shouldn’t throw away the tissue paper; it was terrific for folding into clothes when you were packing, it took out all that crumpled look, didn’t she find?

Moya sat down very suddenly. Absolutely on a different subject, she said she wondered how many shirts Shane took on holiday. Well, fifteen obviously, and the one he was wearing and sports shirts and a couple of beach shirts.

“Twenty shirts?” Moya said faintly.

That was about it.

And would there be twenty socks and knickers, too? Well, give or take. Give or take how many? A pair or two. There seemed to be a selection of shoes and belts, and the odd sun hat.

Moya felt all the time that Shane would smile his lovely familiar, heart-turning smile and say, “I had you fooled, hadn’t I?” and they would fall happily into each other’s arms. But Shane said nothing.

Shane was hoping that Moya would tell him soon where all this list of faintly haranguing questions was leading. Why she was asking him in such a robotic voice about perfectly normal things. It was as if she asked him did he brush his teeth or did he put on his clothes before leaving the house. He stared at her anxiously. Perhaps he wasn’t showing enough interest in her wardrobe? Maybe he should ask about her gear.

That did not seem to be a happy solution.

Moya, it turned out, was a person who had never checked in a suitcase in her life; she had a soft squelchy bag of the exact proportions that would fit under an airline seat and would pass as carry-on baggage. She brought three knickers, three bras, three shirts, three skirts, and three bathing suits. She brought a sponge bag, a pair of flip-flop sandals, and a small tube of travel detergent.

She thought that a holiday should never involve waiting for your bags at any airport, and never take in dressing for dinner, and the idea of carrying home laundry bags of dirty clothes was as foreign to her as it was to Shane—that anyone would spend holiday time washing things and drying them.

“But it only takes a minute,” pleaded Moya.

“But it takes no time at all if you bring spares,” pleaded Shane. “The arms would come out of your sockets carrying that lot," said Moya. “We wouldn’t get into the bathroom with all your clothes draped around it," said Shane.

They talked about it very reasonably, as they had always promised each other they would do. But the rainbows had gone, and the glitter had dimmed.

It would have been better if they had actually met on holidays, they said, with Moya carrying the shabby holdall and Shane the handsome and excessive luggage. Then they would have known from the start that they weren’t people who had the same views about a package tour and how you packed for it. It was a hurdle they might have crossed before they fell in love. Not a horrible shock at the height of romance.

They were practical, Moya and Shane; they wondered if it would iron itself out if they paid the singleroom supplement. That way Moya wouldn’t see the offending Sultan’s Wardrobe, as she kept calling it, and Shane wouldn’t be blinded by wet underwear, as he kept fearing.

But no, it went deeper than that. It seemed to show the kind of people they were: too vastly different ever to spend two weeks, let alone a lifetime, together.

As the good practical friends they were, they went back to the travel agency and transferred their bookings to separate holidays with separate hopes and dreams.

It was to be one of the most stylish weddings of the year. Florrie thought that if anyone had been giving odds a quarter of a century ago when she was born whether this child would ever be a guest at something like this, those odds would have been enormous. A child born in a small house in a small street in Wigan didn’t seem likely to end up as the bride’s best friend at what the newspapers were calling the wedding of the decade. If only her mother had lived, Florrie thought, if only her father had cared. They might have been able to get some mileage out of it, some reward for the long hours of work, the high hopes.

There would be pictures of Florrie in tomorrow’s papers, probably a glimpse of her on tonight’s television news. She would figure certainly in the glossy magazines, her hat alone would ensure she was well snapped. She would be seen laughing and sharing a joke, probably with some youngish and handsome member of the aristocracy. This would not be hard, because unusually for a society wedding there might not be many young women friends of the bride around. And the groom’s friends, being horsey, would not be as photogenic. No, Florrie knew that she would figure in the Tatler and Harper’s. And she knew how to smile without showing a mouthful of teeth and how to raise her chin in a way that made her neck look long and upper class.

She knew that it looked much more classy not to be seen with a glass in her hand, but to appear fascinated by the particular braying chap that she was meant to be talking to.

Florrie knew all of this because she had worked at it, and learned it. Like she had never worked at anything when she was at school.

Long ago in a different place and at a different time, with Camilla, except of course that Camilla had not been Camilla then, she had been Ruby. And Ruby and Florrie had been best friends. As in many ways they were still best friends today. The society columns might well describe Florrie tomorrow as a very close friend of the bride. But it would not say that they had grown up together, that they had shared great doorstep sandwiches in their lunch hour, that they had collected old newspapers just so that they could read the society pages and see how people lived in a different and better world.

They had read their subject carefully, young Ruby and young Florrie. No hint of social climbing or being a hanger-on. Not even the most suspicious could fault Camilla or catch her out in a lie today. Camilla had always said she was from way up north, that her parents were dead, that she had hardly any family.

Better to stick as close to the truth as possible, she had advised Florrie, less for them to unearth, and you can never be caught out in a lie. Even if they found out she had once been Ruby, Camilla was prepared to say it had been a pet name. She thought it was terribly brave and funny of Florrie to hold on to her name.

But then, Florrie was such a character! Florrie had held on to her name because she remembered her mother holding her as a little girl.

“I had a doll once called Florrie,” her mother had said. “I never thought I’d have a little baby of my own, a beautiful baby to look after.” Florrie was three when she heard this first, hardly a baby, and still further from babyhood when her mother dressed her for school and held her face gently between red rough hands. “Florrie,” she had breathed in a voice full of admiration and love. “Such a beautiful name for a beautiful little girl. They wanted me to call you Caroline…but I wanted a beautiful name for you, one you’d love…

Florence. It means a f lower, little Florrie, beautiful little flower.”

Ruby’s mother might have thought she was a little jewel. She might even have said so, but Camilla never said it Camilla said nothing about her parents. Except that they were dead.

Which was true.

They had died together in a coach crash, on the very first holiday of their married life.

Florrie’s father had said that’s what you got for grand ideas, coach tours to the Continent, no less. Florrie’s mother had said maybe they should take in the child. Ruby was eleven, and she had nobody else. Everyone had said it was a great idea. After all, it was unusual to be an only child in their street. Now Ruby and Florrie were like twins. And apart from reading all those “silly books,” as people called the magazines they read, they were sensible girls, too.

Not silly like some, not getting into trouble with boys. Hardworking. On Saturdays they worked in the beauty salon, and they learned how it was all done. The proprietor never had two such willing assistants. As well as sweeping floors and folding towels, they stood entranced watching the facials and manicures.

The customers liked them, two bright youngsters full of unqualified admiration. The customers didn’t know they had come to learn—as they went to the fashion stores to learn, and as they worked in the good hotel to watch. And they did secretarial courses at night. By the time they had their O levels they were ready for anything. Ruby was ready to leave, to go south to start Stage Two. Florrie could go nowhere, her mother was failing fast.

She sat by her mother’s bed and listened to the homespun wisdom, with a heart that was filled with impatience as well as love. She heard her mother beg her to believe that Dad was a good man really. It was just that he was a bit mulish, and drank a little too much. Dad had said no kind word in the seventeen years that Florrie had lived in his house. She nodded and pretended that she agreed with the mother, who would not be leaving hospital and coming home. Her mother said that Ruby was right to have gone to London, she was impatient, she would have been silly to stay around. The woman found nothing odd that the child she had taken in had abandoned her.

Ruby has great unhappiness in her soul, she said. Florrie sat by the bed and gritted her teeth. Patience and forgiveness like this were unrealistic. Surely they couldn’t be considered virtues. The nurses liked her, the handsome tall girl, a blonde with well-cut hair and long pink fingernails, unlike her stooped and workweary mother. The daughter had character, the nurses told each other. She wouldn’t stay long with the bad-tempered father once the poor woman passed away.

Florrie stayed a week. Her father’s farewell was grudging, as every other gesture had been.

He had always known she would go, he said, too high and mighty by far for them. No, she needn’t keep coming back up, there wasn’t all that much more to say.

Florrie was astonished at the change in her friend in ten short months. Vowel sounds had altered, and that wasn’t all. Ruby was no longer Ruby. It’s only a name, she had explained, it could have been anything.

“I know,” Florrie had said. “I should have been Caroline.”

“Then BE Caroline,” Camilla had begged.

“Never.” Florrie’s eyes had flashed at the thought.

They looked at each other then, a long look.

“It’s only the name,” Florrie had said eventually. “I’m on for everything else.”

And it was like the old days. They laughed as they heard each other’s phrases; you never said you had been to the WC or the toilet, it was the lavatory. You didn’t say serviette, you said napkin, and it wasn’t posh to have paper ones that you could throw away when they got crumpled. They had plenty of time: It was an apprenticeship, they told each other. They had until they were twenty, then they would be ready. To move among the smart and the beautiful, to be at ease among them, to marry them and live in comfort for the rest of their lives.

It would only be hard if they were unprepared. They had heard too many tales of people being trapped by their humble origins.

Camilla and Florrie would be different. They would invent no pedigree that could be checked and found faulty. They would shrug and ask did such things matter anymore. They would look so much the part and seem to care so little about proving themselves that soon they would be accepted. They would try hard but would never be seen to try at all; that was the secret.

And soon they were indeed ready. And it wasn’t nearly as difficult as they thought.

There was a career structure. Chalet girls in ski resorts, a few weeks working in smart jewelers and in art houses so that they met the right type of girl. They were slow to take up with the right type of men at the beginning.

They wanted other girls to be their allies at the start. And anyway they wanted to be ready when they found the really right men. They had noticed that it wasn’t only the Royals who liked their girlfriends not to have played the field; a lot of the Uppers thought that girls who had been around a lot might not be good wife material, and after all, one wouldn’t like to think that lots of chaps had been with one’s wife. What?

And in the meantime, because they were so bright and met so many people, they actually got good jobs. Camilla was high up in an estate agency and Florrie was now a partner in a firm of interior decorators. Years of watching for quality and trying to define it had paid off for both of them.

And then Camilla showed a couple of town houses to a chap who thought she was quite super and asked her to his place in the country for the weekend. She went, but she was slower than he thought to begin with a teeny affair, as he called it. In fact, she was adamant about not beginning it. He complained about her bitterly over a bottle of Bollinger to his friend Albert. Albert said that it was very rum, the girl must be mad. He’d like to meet her; he always liked meeting mad people.

Albert was of blood so blue that it almost frightened Camilla off. But she decided to take him on. This was the challenge she had spent years rehearsing for. This was the prize she had hardly dared to hope for.

Albert was intrigued by her. The girl who hadn’t been to bed with his friend, who wouldn’t go to bed with him either. Who wasn’t frightened of his mother, who was casual to the point of indifference about her own background. She was not a gold digger, she had a position of importance in her firm.

Nobody could see the potential like Camilla, they said. She dressed well, she seemed to have lots of girlfriends who all spoke glowingly of her. She had no past.

Camilla played it beautifully. She waited until Albert was truly besotted and at that precise moment she told him she was thinking of moving to Washington, D.C. There had been interest and offers; she was vague lest he ask her what interest and which offers. But she had timed it right. Albert couldn’t let her leave. Albert’s father predictably said she was a fine-looking filly but had she any breeding; his mother unpredictably said she was about the only kind of woman who might make a success of Albert and the rolling acres, and the complicated property investments and the tied cottages. The wedding of the decade was on.

It was decided between them that Florrie should not be the bridesmaid; the press would be too inquisitive, would ask about their origins. Papers nowadays did horrible things.

They might send a photographer up to that small street and, perish the thought, find Florrie’s father, surly in his suspenders. And he might tell that Camilla was Ruby and that her parents had been killed on their first coach tour abroad.

Better to have six flower girls and Albert’s horsey-looking sister. Wiser to have the lovely Florrie stand out among the guests. A young woman of elegance, successful in her field.

Further proof, if any were needed, that the bride was the right stuff or as right as you can get in these days of social change and upheaval.

Florrie stood in the old church and looked up at the flags of the regiment that Albert’s family had fought in. The stained-glass windows remembered various ancestors, and the pews had brass plates recalling the family. The bishop was old and genial. He spoke of duty and of hope. Florrie listened as she looked at Camilla’s beautiful face; she knew that her friend was listening, too.

Then the bishop spoke of love. He told how it conquered everything and that it cast out envy and ambition and greed. His eyes became misty when he talked of love.

The night before, Florrie and Camilla had talked for a long time. They had talked as they had never been able to talk since that day when Florrie had come to London and said she would change everything, everything but her name. They laughed as they hadn’t laughed for years, they drank champagne instead of the lemon tea they had learned to like when they were fourteen because they had read it was lower class to take milk.

They had said that the battle had been half won, and now that Camilla was in, she could have the right kind of dinner parties and house parties to launch her friend. Her talented friend with the wonderfully funny name. They had embraced and congratulated each other on their magical apprenticeship.

But they hadn’t talked about love. And in the church where Albert’s bones would lie one day, very probably beside the bones of her friend Ruby, Florrie shivered. She knew that as far as she was concerned the apprenticeship was over. She had got far enough. Perhaps she had got much farther than her friend who would appear in tomorrow’s papers as the bride of the decade, who would be called Lady Camilla, who would live a life without love.

They said that young girls’ heads were meant to be filled with stories of love, but that had never happened to Ruby or Florrie. There had been no room in their heads, the space was too filled with rule books on how to behave and how to say “glad to know you” rather than “pleased to meet you.” It had been too busy an apprenticeship to allow for thoughts of love.

Florrie would make time for it, she thought.

She would not list the likely dinner guests that she might trap at her friend’s long table, smiling at them confidently through Albert’s family silver. When a bishop or vicar or a registrar came to say the word for Florrie, the word love wouldn’t have an alien ring to it.

She felt somehow that the mother who had thought of her as a flower would have been pleased with her and she was aware of tears beginning to well up in her eyes. But she willed them back, because the upper classes do not cry at christenings, weddings, or funerals. It is, after all, what sets them apart. Her apprenticeship had not been wasted.

Lena had loved him for four long years.

Not that he knew, of course. Men like Shay wouldn’t even consider that they could be loved silently and unselfishly like that. It didn’t make sense.

He probably assumed that Lena was fond of him, admired him, and might under the right circumstances be attracted to him. But if he thought of her at all, he might have assumed that she had a private life of her own. He would never have thought that this quiet, efficient assistant of his spent her entire life, both in and out of the office, thinking about him, trying to make his life easier and better, and in her dreams trying to share that life with him.

According to Maggie, Lena was not in love.

She was suffering from an obsession, an infatuation. It wasn’t healthy for someone who was twenty-six to develop this kind of crush on a man who didn’t return it and wasn’t even aware of it. And however unwise it might have been to have allowed a temporary fascination to take over, it was positively dangerous to let it continue the way Lena had. She stopped being twenty-six and became twenty-seven, and twenty-eight and twenty-nine. Soon she would be thirty years of age, and what had she to show for it?

Lena said spiritedly that she had as much to show for it as anyone had to show for anything.

She had been happy, she had made his life better. She hadn’t made a public fool of herself, as so many women had. She hadn’t settled for second best, as so many others had done. She loved every second of her working day, which was more than you could say for a lot of people. She was appreciated if not loved in her office, and only Maggie knew her secret.

She was not an object of pity. Maggie wouldn’t tut-tut and shake her head over coffee with the girls about Lena’s foolishness. Maggie was an ally, even if she didn’t understand.

Maggie was Lena’s aunt. But they had always been much more like cousins or sisters.

Only ten years divided them in age, and the teenage Maggie had loved the toddler, Lena, and treated her as a friend. Now Maggie, almost forty, with huge dark eyes and a great mane of black curly hair, looked and acted younger than her niece. Her life was fuller by far. Maggie’s problem had never been making men love her. It had been trying to stop them from loving her unwisely. And sometimes trying to stop herself from loving them in return—equally unwisely.

She had been married twice, widowed the first time, separated the second time, but these were only small milestones in the list of Maggie’s love: Sensible married men, fathers of large and settled families, wanted to throw up everything and move in with Maggie. She often had great trouble persuading them to do nothing of the sort. It wasn’t that she gave them unmentionable sexual favors, she told Lena with her big dark eyes full of honesty, it was just that they saw, however foolishly, a kind of life with her where they wouldn’t be hassled and troubled. They saw a strange and unrealistic freedom in living with Maggie, something they didn’t have at home. Maggie would never ask them to come to the supermarket and push the trolley, Maggie wasn’t a one for wanting the grass cut or the house painted, the car cleaned or the patio built up to impress the neighbors. Maggie would be happy to eat a meal of wild mushrooms and brown bread followed by strawberries. Very far from real life. Maggie would agree with them fervently that she was indeed far from real life and they must see her only now and then. The more she protested, the more they wanted her. Lena said she was outraged at the way Maggie got every man she wanted, and yet she, Lena, who kept all the rules, couldn’t get just the one.

Lena did keep the rules as written in the women’s magazines. She had shiny, well-cut hair, she was tall and slim, she had been to makeup lessons to make the most of her good complexion, her fair skin, and blue eyes. She dressed well and kept her clothes immaculately. Well, why wouldn’t she, Maggie grumbled, if she stayed at home every evening dreaming of lover boy Shay. There was all the time in the world to iron her blouses and sponge her skirts and polish her shoes, handbags, and belts till they shone. But had it done one bit of good in the department where she wanted it to succeed? No. None at all.

Lena’s friends and colleagues all said she looked very smart, but their praise and admiration was of no interest to her. Sometimes they wondered why she didn’t have a man in her life. She put them off with a laugh. And apart from Maggie, nobody had an inkling.

Maggie’s grumbling had always been goodnatured. But now it was different. Two things were coming up: Lena’s thirtieth birthday, and a business trip with the famous Shay. Yes, he had asked the loyal Lena to London with him. Driving in his car, for a whole week.

Maggie felt it was time to play the heavy aunt for the first time in her life. She sat Lena down and told her to get ready for a serious lecture.

“Oh, not now,” Lena had cried. “Not now.

There’s so much to be done, so many preparations. I have to decide what to wear, what to say, what social plans to set up, as well as all his business meetings. Can’t the lecture wait till I get home?”

“No, it can’t.” Maggie was adamant. “It’s about the trip; this has to be the make-or-break time. When you come back on the ferry and drive off the ramp, Shay must either be involved with you properly or else you will have given up all notion of him.”

Lena’s blue eyes filled with tears. “I don’t want anything as definite, as black-and-white, as that. Why does it all have to hinge on this trip?” She looked appalled at having to abandon what was after all the central part of her life.

“Because you are leaving your twenties and for the first time you are leaving the country with this beauty, and you have the rest of your life ahead of you.”

“It’s too frightening. I don’t want to try and seduce him or something like that.” Lena was trembling at the thought.

“Well, what’s all the fuss about what you’re going to wear and how you’re going to look? If you don’t want him to fancy you, why don’t you just go in an old sweater and a pair of jeans?” Maggie was ruthless.

“It’s different for you, you can make anyone fancy you.”

“So could you if you bothered. It’s got nothing to do with well-cut jackets and applying your blusher properly,” Maggie said.

“How, then?” Lena was eager.

“I’ll tell you, but only if you promise me that you will decide one way or another at the end of the week. When you come back off that car ferry, you’ll either be involved with him properly as two normal people who love each other, or you will leave that job, and put him out of your mind and heart.”

“It’s like doing a deal with the devil,” Lena complained.

“Much more like a guardian angel,” Maggie said.

They sat for three hours, Maggie with her notebook. At no stage were outfits or perfumes mentioned. There was no strategy about booking one room by mistake instead of two. There was to be no research into romantic restaurants in London where the lights would be low and there might even be violins in the background. No, if Lena was to get her man these kinds of cheap tricks were only Mickey Mouse efforts, according to Maggie. And since almost every man who moved in Dublin seemed to fancy Maggie in some way or other, she was worth listening to.

Maggie seemed shocked that Lena had worked for this man for four years, not to mention thinking that she had loved him for this length of time, and still knew so little about him. Maggie asked a string of questions. Lena knew nothing about his school days, whether he had liked it there or not, and how he had got into the business world in the first place.

She didn’t know who his first employers had been, whether he had found it easy or frightening. She didn’t know what television programs he watched, and when he went to a match if it was because he knew all about the game or because he liked the sociability of it.

Lena didn’t know how he got on with his two brothers and sister, how often he went to see his mother. She didn’t know if he liked being with his nephews and nieces. If he felt lonely on weekends, as so many people did in Dublin. How he decided what to eat and whether he had a washing machine or went to the launderette.

“What do you know about him, for heaven’s sake?” Maggie asked with some impatience.

Lena knew all about his current and past girlfriends, and she knew the restaurants he went to, and the nightclubs, and the bills for bouquets of flowers. She knew that and she knew about him at work, where he was tough and not afraid to go into a meeting and fight.

“Well-briefed by you, of course, with reports you have been working on all weekend when you weren’t putting more henna in your hair, hoping he’d notice.”

“I love him,” protested Lena.

“No, you don’t love him at all. You don’t know the first thing about him apart from this empty social thing. You might love him when you get to know him, and he might love you.

But you might find him empty.”

Lena refused to accept this but agreed meekly to follow Maggie’s advice. In the ship’s dining room over a meal she would begin, and in the long drive across Britain she would not veer between business talk and gossip-column chat about nightclubs she didn’t even know.

She would talk to him about himself.

“Suppose he asks me about myself?” Lena asked fearfully.

Maggie didn’t much think he would, but if he did, then she was to tell him the truth. Say she was perfectly happy, she had no wish to change from her life the way it was, assure him it was satisfactory. There was nothing that drove men as mad as that—the thought that women were actually contented the way they were, not scheming and conniving.

“But that’s not strictly true. I’m not totally contented the way I am,” Lena complained.

Maggie shrugged. “You always tell me you are when I try to change you.”

It was unanswerable.

The day before the trip Maggie rang her to wish her luck. “One thing, Lena, and remember this: He will notice you, he will fancy you.

Truthfully, but you may not fancy him.”

“I probably gave you much too shallow a view of him,” Lena whispered in case anyone in the office would hear.

“If that was your view of him after four years of loving him, then I’m sure what you told me was very accurate,” Maggie said.

Lena learned a lot that night at dinner on board ship. She learned that his mother was demanding and never satisfied, that his brothers were discontented and jealous of his success. She heard that Shay’s sisters didn’t know how to bring up their children properly and gave in to them in everything. She heard that his school was full of sadistic teachers and moronic pupils, that they had ripped him off in his first job and cheated him in his second, and he had seen them coming in his third. He liked to cook but not to wash up; he thought these service apartments he lived in were a bit cramped, but he didn’t want to take on the whole palaver of gardens and roofs and drains in a house. He was probably looking for something like a town house.

In the old days, like every day up to this, Lena would have immediately said she would make inquiries about town houses, and go to endless trouble ringing up auctioneers and estate agents. This time she made no offers.

“What about your house or flat, is it what you want?” he asked, almost cursorily, as if he had felt that he might have been talking just a little too much about himself.

“Oh, it’s fine. I’m very happy there,” she said. She told him it was a garden flat and had plenty of light as well as nice shrubs and bushes outside big windows. He nodded briskly but seemed to look at her with slightly more interest.

On the long drive to London, they talked about friends. Shay said that he ran with a very lively crowd. No, they weren’t around on weekends much, but then, he often came into the office on Saturday afternoons to do a little catching up. Lena knew this only too well. She had to cope with the results of it on Mondays: confused notes, complicated questions. She had begun every week for as long as she could remember by sorting out his thoughts for a secretary to type up. He had got all the credit.

Somehow it was disappointing to know he came in only because he was bored on Saturday afternoons. She had thought it was ambition.

He took his washing to his mother, it turned out. She could not believe it, but it was true.

He had to go and see the woman once a week anyway, and she had a machine, so it made sense to leave her one load and collect another. And she liked it; what else had she to do?

By the time the signposts saying Central London came up, Lena had opened more doors than she might have wished to in Shay’s life.

He suggested they grab something to eat, and she said thank you but no. She had friends to see in London, so unless there was anything they wanted to discuss about work for the conference tomorrow, she would leave him to his own devices.

He seemed quite put out by this. Lena looked at his handsome face scowling with almost childlike disappointment.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to do the clubland circuit in London?” he asked, not very kindly.

“Lord no, that’s not my world at all. Just dinner with friends.”

It was true. Dinner with two old school friends—one a nun, one a nurse. They laughed and talked over old times. Something was lighter in Lena’s laugh; she felt it wasn’t an effort.

Next day they worked companionably at the conference, but she excused herself at lunchtime to sneak in a little shopping and said that she had a theater date in the evening. He was thoroughly bad-tempered on the second day of the conference.

“Are you going to keep running away all the time, or will we see each other at all?” he grumbled.

Big blue eyes wide, she said that honestly she was sorry…but since they never went out socially at home, she assumed it would be the same here. But, of course, she would be delighted to have dinner with him if he had anywhere in mind.

“I thought you might arrange somewhere," he said.

“Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of it. If you are asking me to dinner, then you must, of course, choose where.”

It would once have been her wildest dream.

Not only was the place expensive and romantic, but as he told her tale after tale of being misunderstood, betrayed, cheated, having got even, he took her hand.

“You’re very easy to talk to, Lena, and you look very lovely. I hadn’t realized.” She had smiled. It was a smile of someone who had known that this was predictable, not of someone who thought it was perfect.

When the evening ended and he suggested a brandy in his room, she said no. Perhaps she would prefer to have the nightcap in her room, he suggested, probably thinking that this was the height of sensitivity. No nightcap at all, Lena said. She who had planned this night for so long, and all it would lead to.

At one stage she began to wonder if Maggie had set her up. Every single harmless question she had asked had brought such a negative response that she had managed to strip Shay the man she had loved for years of any lovable quality. It was as if Maggie had known the answers in advance.

Maggie hadn’t suggested that Lena talk to Shay of love.

But that night she did. They were in a restaurant looking out on the river, and he told her that he thought he loved her—yes, strange as it might seem, and having worked together for so long—but he did think he loved her.

She looked at him for a long time.

“Well, say something,” he said petulantly.

“I don’t have any words,” she said truthfully.

He reached for her hands, but she pulled them away.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

“How nice it is to love you, how there you were under my nose all the time.”

At least, she thought, at least he is honest in a childish sort of way. It must be nice for him to think he’s found a ready-made love under his nose, as he put it.

For years she had seen how suitable she would be for him, how right as a companion, a friend, a wife. How much she would help his career and cope with his weaknesses.

Until tonight she had never seen what it would be like for her. A lifetime of putting up with his moods, building him up when he was low, lying for him, pretending for him. And turning a blind eye when he wanted to run with a lively crowd and do the clubs and walk the blondes.

She smiled at him affectionately. It was the way she had seen her aunt Maggie smile at a multitude of men.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

He was sulking now; his declaration of love had not only not been returned, it had been smiled at, patted down, soothed away.

“I was thinking about going home, about driving out of the ferry and going home,” she said.

This was a very puzzling response. “Why, what will you do then?” he was anxious to know.

Lena wondered what would she do. She wouldn’t leave her job just because he had said he loved her and she wouldn’t love him back.

She liked her work, she would stay there and overtake him if necessary. She would not fight with him or explain or apologize—Maggie never did that. She was happy in her garden flat, and now she was free as well. If some man came along—as men came along for Maggie—that she really did like, then she was free to love him.

“What will I do?” she answered him almost dreamily. The world was so full of possibilities now that the question was hard to answer.

“What will I do when I get home? I think I’ll telephone my aunt.”

It’s like a real cruise, isn’t it?” Mary said, then wished she hadn’t said it. What did she know about a real cruise except reading the brochures?

“I was just thinking that too,” said Lavender, the older woman. “Not that I was ever on a cruise, mind, but it feels as if we should have two weeks, and visit exotic places every day instead of just getting out at Liverpool.” They laughed, united in never having been on a luxury cruise liner, united in admiring the seagulls, and valuing a few minutes away from the family.

“Are you going or coming back?” Lavender asked. She had a kind face and bright, interested eyes. Mary felt you could talk and she really might care what you said.

“Going over. The children have never seen their grandparents. It’s a bit of an ordeal really.”

Why had she told that to a stranger? She hadn’t told any of her neighbors, nor her best friend Kath, nor her sister Betty. Why did she blurt it out to a woman with a North of England accent on the B & I boat?

“Oh, I know,” Lavender consoled her. “It’s always an ordeal, isn’t it? Maybe we should have to live with our in-laws all the time in the same tribe and never move, or else we should never see them at all. It’s the in-between bit that causes all the guilt.”

This was so exactly true that Mary almost jumped to hear her own feelings echoed….

“Did you have that kind of…well, that kind of thing, you know, with your husband’s parents? Wanting to make it all closer and then getting it a bit wrong?”

“Tell me,” Lavender said.

And Mary did. Every bit of it. Slowly, hesitating sometimes, going back over bits in case they hadn’t been fair. How she met John when he was on a cycling holiday in Ireland. John was unhappy at college, he found it was hurting him inside his head, the stress and the worry. It wasn’t only exams and study. He didn’t think he would ever be happy as a teacher. He was too anxious in the classroom practice, he wouldn’t be able to keep control, and he could not look forward to a life that would be a constant battle and a series of confrontations in the classroom every day.

“Why don’t you do something else with your life, then?” Mary had asked him. “We only get to come onto the earth once. Wouldn’t it be a pity to spend it all doing something that makes you unsettled?”

It was like a revelation to John. There and then he decided to abandon the idea of being a teacher. He wrote to the college, he wrote to his parents and to his girlfriend in London. He said he had been feeling a bit lost; now he was going to find himself in Ireland. He was going to work on a farm while he was finding out what to do with the rest of his life.

Nobody was pleased—not the college, which worried about his grant, not his girlfriend in London, who worried for four weeks and then sent a card telling him it couldn’t matter less whether he found himself or didn’t, since she had found somebody more normal.

And his parents worried most of all. He was an only child; they had their hopes set on his being a teacher, and now he was a farmhand in Ireland, for heaven’s sake. They were very disapproving. They were not people who wrote letters much or made cross-Channel phone calls. But they disapproved nonetheless. Heavily.

And when John and Mary got engaged, they assumed that it was a shotgun marriage, which it wasn’t, and that it would be in a Roman Catholic Church full of images of saints and the Virgin, which it was. And they said they couldn’t come to the wedding.

Mary sent pictures of the children, Jacinta, now eight, and John Paul, who was born the day the Pope came to Ireland and was seven.

Looking back on it, Mary wondered if she should have chosen different names for the children. But surely that wasn’t important.

John’s parents could hardly disapprove of a child’s name as being from a different tribe.

And Mary had been careful to send pictures of the children at Christmas rather than the First Communion snapshot that she felt the instinct to send each time.

Lavender was full of praise. Mary had done more than her share. And where was the problem?

It wasn’t exactly a problem; there was no out-and-out war, just a distance in every sense of the word. And a dread of meeting these people, who wouldn’t come to Ireland, who had never shown any greater interest than a dutiful card at Christmastime. Mary was not looking forward to hearing what a brilliant career had been cut short when John had met her in Ireland ten long years ago.

She didn’t want to make excuses for the life they led in a small country town where John worked happily on a farm and Mary was a dressmaker.

And they were going now because John’s father was unemployed, had been for a year, and the word had trickled back from a woman neighbor that John’s dad was taking it hard.

Mary had suggested they visit Ireland and as usual it had been turned down, so, gritting her teeth, she had then suggested that they take the children to visit their grandparents, and this had been agreed to. Ungraciously, of course. “You’ll have to take us as you find us.”

But still agreed.

It was a two-week visit. Too long, Mary thought, but it was a huge undertaking, four of them to go to London; it would be a great waste to go for less time.

Lavender said that Mary was a positive gem among women. She said she was sure that the parents-in-law would be so pleased that in a few days they would all wonder whether the distance could possibly have been in their imaginations.

“Would you like a little advice?” she asked, almost shyly.

“Oh, I’d love anything you could tell me, you being English and a bit older, not that you’d be as old as them or anything, but you know…”

Lavender leaned her back against the rail, squinted into the sun, and talked not directly to Mary but as if she was speaking to herself.

She looked very much like a woman who should be on a luxury cruise liner waiting for an executive husband to come back from a game of deck tennis with the captain.

“I wouldn’t apologize or explain too much.

Maybe let them think they were part of your lives, even though they weren’t. The children should know a bit about them, like their birthdays and their names, and where they grew up themselves. And perhaps you might ask, all of you, about your husband as a little boy, you know, when he was seven or eight, what he read and what toys he played with. They probably have them still. And it could be assumed rather than said that one day, soon, but not a fixed day, the grandparents would come to Ireland.”

Lavender seemed apologetic. She felt she had talked too much.

“I wish you wouldn’t say you were laying down the law. I’m just overjoyed to get some ideas. That’s a very good thought, you know. I don’t know their birthdays and the children don’t know anything at all about them.”

“There’ll be plenty of time on the train to London.”

“You have children yourself ?” Mary was diffident.

“One, a daughter.” There seemed to be a full stop.

“That’s nice,” Mary said. “Or isn’t it?”

“Not much at the moment, it isn’t.”

They had started to walk around the deck.

People sat in chairs lathering themselves with Nivea. Duty-free bags were being tucked under the sunbathers, children ran round excited, passengers had all started to talk to each other in the relaxed way of holidaymakers. There might be long drives, or train journeys, or even family ordeals ahead, but on the ship they were suspended. It was time out of time. People spoke, as they often had no time to speak when on land.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said to Lavender. “You’re so easy, you should have a good time with a daughter.”

“I did until she was fourteen. Then she met this lad. Oh, I think a hundred times a day how different life would have been if she hadn’t met him.

“She never opened a schoolbook from that day to this. We were before the courts for her every month of the year. If it wasn’t truancy it was shoplifting, then it was glue sniffing, then it was a stolen car.”

It had certainly not been the life they had hoped for their Emma.

“And did she get over the lad?” Mary sighed, thinking that all this might easily lie ahead for her with Jacinta in a troubled world.

“No, she’ll never get over him. She’s eighteen now and he’s found a new love. So Emma sits and cries. She’s sitting down in the restaurant now with her dad, crying. I couldn’t take it anymore; she cried all through this holiday in Ireland we took specially to give her a treat.

I couldn’t see it for one second more. That’s why I came up on deck.”

“I’m glad you did,” Mary said.

“So am I,” said Lavender. “But you can see I’m not one to be handing out advice. You see how poor my own situation is. I can’t even sit and talk to my own daughter.”

“Wasn’t it nice of you to bring her to Ireland on a holiday, though?” Mary said admiringly. “A lot of mothers would not have done, with a girl who got into all that sort of trouble.

She’s lucky.”

“She doesn’t think so, she thinks she’s cursed with middle-aged, old-fashioned parents. She’d like to be left alone with that yobbo.”