The Return Journey by Maeve Binchy
“That’s all right, as long as they know it.”
“That’s all right whether they know it or not,” Robert flashed.
“You remind me more and more of Dale,” Frankie said. “The same cynical way of looking at everything.”
“You are beginning to remind me more and more of my wife. The same way of picking a row and nagging over everything.”
Frankie had read somewhere that you know when something is over, you know that this is the moment, but you won’t accept it. You try to say it was because one person had too many tiring days negotiating, and the other person had too much unexpected sun.
Robert probably knew, too, because when he was called to the phone he went with eagerness and came back to say that some of the men needed him for a further conference.
They parted pleasantly, almost with relief.
Frankie went walking on the beach in the last rays of the sun. She felt Tracey rushing up to her before she knew Shane was on the beach as well.
“I had a friend in New York, a great friend, she was going to come here and run the Greener Grass with me. You know, a joint enterprise. Then she said she’d join me later. Then she said she needed thinking time. Then she said she’d write.”
They walked in silence; there seemed no need to say anything. Frankie thought about all those years, and those two honeymoons where she had felt she needed to entertain Robert all the time, talk to him, be bright, show no hurt, no loneliness.
“He’s not my husband,” she said after a long time.
“Oh, I know,” said Shane.
“How?”
“Labels on suitcases, his instructions about not ever calling him to the phone if the office rang but always taking a name and a time he should call at. If you were married, he would have asked you to take the messages.”
After another long time Frankie asked, “Is it all right? You know, running the place as a single venture, not a joint one as you had thought?”
“Yes, it’s all right. It mightn’t always be single. You never know your luck.”
The sea was calm now. They skimmed flat stones and made them hop.
“He’ll be going back soon, I imagine,” Shane said. “The lads tell me it’s all settled.”
“Yes, well, they wouldn’t want to rely on that too much.”
“They’re smarter than they sound,” Shane said with a laugh. “All us fellows who worked over the water learned a bit about business.”
“We had planned to stay on a bit when it was settled, but I don’t think so now.”
“No, he’ll want to be off. He might even catch the tail end of the Cannes thing.”
“A place where the sun shines all the time and there’s no sense of surprise?” Frankie smiled at him.
“The very spot,” Shane said.
“And what’s the weather forecast like here?” she wondered.
“Optimistic but unknown,” said Shane.
“I’ll stay,” said Frankie. “I’ll certainly stay on awhile until I know how it turns out.”
They walked back to the Greener Grass in a companionable silence, because they knew there was no need to say anything, or plan anything, or spell anything out, or indeed say anything at all.
VICTOR AND ST. VALENTINE
Victor was brought up in a home where they made a huge fuss of St. Valentine’s Day. His sisters spent weeks wondering if anyone would send them a card; his mother cooked a very special meal for her husband that evening and served it by candlelight. His father bought something romantic like a heart-shaped charm for her bracelet, a little pendant, a glass vase for a single rose.
No wonder he thought it was a special day.
In the real world, he discovered, things were different. At school, for example, fellows didn’t send girls cards unless they were jokey ones, often with hurtful remarks on them.
Nobody made any mention of St. Valentine’s Day ceremonies in their homes, so Victor stayed quiet about his own household. No point in inviting mockery. It was quite enough that he was already the subject of a lot of ridicule because of gentleness, good manners, and a lack of interest in beating up his classmates in the playground.
Then, later, when he went to train as an electrician, they did make a bit of a fuss and celebration at Technical College for a St. Valentine’s Day dance but mainly the chat was about which girls would be likely and which would not.
Victor never wanted to talk about people being likely; he thought it was too personal a thing to be speculated over in the bars. So the others more or less gave up on him in this area.
His first boss was not a man with much time for St. Valentine. A load of commercial claptrap, he said.
Around that time Victor sent a valentine card to a nice girl called Harriet who had gone to the pictures with him several times. Harriet telephoned him at once.
“Listen, Victor, I’m sorry, there has been some awful misunderstanding. I wasn’t being serious or committed or wanting to marry you or anything.” Victor was alarmed.
“No, heavens no, neither was I,” he said, panicking at the very thought.
“Then why did you send me this card with all the roses and violets and sign your name?” she asked.
“Because it’s St. Valentine’s Day,” he said.
“But you signed your own name. Naturally I thought you wanted commitment.” Harriet was outraged at the misunderstanding.
“I’m very sorry,” Victor said humbly. “I’ll never do it again.”
But of course he did do it again, when he met Muriel, and did fancy her greatly.
Muriel said he should have had the courage to come straight out and say it if he loved her and rather than relying on a card and somebody else’s verses and sentiments. She couldn’t see a future for them. She was sorry.
Victor decided he was not good with women. He wasn’t without dates, a social life, and indeed the odd little romance, but none of them led to anything.
He was, however, a very good electrician. He had a pleasant manner and a lot of skill, and soon he didn’t have to have a boss at all—he had his own business. A mobile phone, a business card, and a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations, and Victor had more customers than he could deal with.
Sometimes they asked him about his private life. “Never met the right woman for me,” he would say. “And here I am a hopeless romantic. But the girls don’t take me up on it at all.”
He was thirty-eight, tousled hair, a warm smile.
People didn’t really believe him. They thought that he might have a very colorful private life but just wasn’t telling.
People liked Victor and told him things. And he liked listening to them, because in his own way he was a little lonely.
He would have liked a companion to go out with on weekends. Someone to go on vacation with.
Victor had saved money for a holiday, but it wasn’t quite the same going alone. So he enjoyed talking to his clients. Like the couple who were going to adopt a baby, and were so excited when it arrived that they invited Victor to the welcome party.
“Are you a relation?” somebody asked him.
“No, but I rewired the nursery,” he said, and again nobody believed him.
And there was the man who dared not tell his wife that he had been made redundant; Victor had many a cup of tea with him on a day when he was merely meant to be putting in new sockets.
And mainly there was old Mrs. Todd.
She was very fond of Victor. She told him all about her family, her son Frank who was so protective of her that he had set up this door-entry system where she could see on a little screen who was there before letting them in. Mrs. Todd hadn’t wanted it all, but her son Frank had insisted; the world was full of bad, dangerous people, he said.
Frank didn’t come much to visit his elderly mother, which Victor thought was a pity, but Frank laid down the law a lot from a distance. Mrs. Todd said that Frank had given instructions she was not to invite any new people that she met to coffee. Thi
Victor thought Frank sounded like a bully but was too tactful to say so. Frank’s daughter, Amy, had gone off to Australia as soon as she was old enough to leave.
Mrs. Todd said that Amy wrote regularly; she lived in Sydney, she worked in a flower shop there, and she was very happy. She wished that her gran would come out and see her.
“Why don’t you go?” Victor encouraged her.
He was in Mrs. Todd’s apartment yet again over an allegedly loose connection. He knew and she knew that there was nothing wrong electrically speaking, but that she was very, very lonely. He would arrange to call on her at a time that suited him when he was in the area, and she paid him a token fee to keep the thing on some kind of professional basis.
“Oh, I couldn’t go for lots of reasons,” she said. “I’m not really able to travel on my own, and anyway it would be a bit awkward. You know Amy doesn’t get on with her father, so even if I were strong enough to travel there alone, it would cause a family upset, and we don’t want that.”
Victor sent her a Valentine’s Day card, but after his earlier frights in such matters, he didn’t sign it.
It was on her mantelpiece when he next called to check the mythical mystery of the immersion heater.
“Thank you so much for the valentine, Victor,” she said.
“What makes you think I sent it?”
“Apart from my late husband, you are the only really romantic person I know,” she said.
The months went on. Her son Frank appeared less and less and gave yet more and more directions.
The letters from Amy were more and more yearning. “Please come out here, Gran, I want to show you my Australia. You are not old, because you have a young heart. I’m saving to send you the fare.”
Around Christmas, when it was cold and wet in London, Victor made a decision.
“Mrs. Todd, why don’t you and I go there early next year together? I’ll deliver you to your granddaughter, then I’ll go off and see a bit of the Outback. I might hire a car and drive to Broken Hill. I’d enjoy that. Then I’d come back and take you back home.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“You are such a kind man, even to think of it. Believe me, that’s enough to make me very happy.”
“No, Mrs. Todd, you must believe me, this is for me as much as you. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. I’ve had the money saved and waiting, I just couldn’t find the excuse.”
“But Frank?”
“Frank will have to accept it.”
“No, Victor. That’s easy for you to say, you’re a young man. I’m an old woman. Frank is all I have. He wouldn’t dream of letting me go out all that way with…with…”
“With the electrician,” Victor finished for her.
“Well, yes, in a word.”
“Then I’ll have to be a friend of Amy’s, that’s what we’ll say.”
They smiled at each other. The adventure had begun.
It didn’t take long to become a friend of Amy’s, much less time than anyone would have thought possible, and all because of E-mail.
Every morning he got a message from her. It was nighttime in Sydney, and Victor sent one back, before she went to sleep. Bit by bit they put together the subterfuge, they invented a way in which they had met and become friends. They rejoiced at each other’s inventiveness.
She said nothing hostile about her father, but made it clear that they were people who, while minimal courtesies would be maintained, would never have a meeting of the minds.
Frank was told, as he had to be, about the upcoming trip. He had a dozen objections, all of them rehearsed, and answered by the three conspirators. But he was up against unequal odds.
And then they were on the plane. Mrs. Todd and Victor. They laughed when the steward thought they were mother and son.
“No, we are partners in an enterprise,” Mrs. Todd explained.
They drank Australian wine to get into the mind-set of the New World. They slept and woke.
And slept. They got out for coffee in the Middle East and for Tiger Beer in Singapore. Neither of them thought it the slightest bit odd to travel together to a continent on the other side of the earth.
They watched movies, they read magazines, and they talked about their past. Mrs. Todd told Victor about Mr. Todd, who had been a wonderful, kind man who brought flowers home every Friday night and had told her she looked like a flower herself.
Victor told Mrs. Todd about the various ladies in his life and how he had been a little too romantic for them. Perhaps his luck would change. No he didn’t, he didn’t really think it would in Australia. They were very modern there, forward looking, they would think he was a silly old Pom.
Mrs. Todd said there were romantic people everywhere in the world, and he must not make generalizations.
Then it was dawn, and they saw the Opera House and the Bridge and all the things they had dreamed of, and they landed.
Crowds waited in the sunshine.
Victor wheeled Mrs. Todd out in her chair.
A girl with a wonderful smile was waving at them. She had on pink shorts and sunglasses. Long black curly hair, dimples in her cheeks.
He knew immediately it was Amy.
“We’re here,” he shouted.
“It’s about time,” she called back.
Mrs. Todd and her granddaughter embraced each other. They hugged and cried, and looked at each other with amazement. Around them the same scene was being acted over and over again. Australians welcoming the relatives from Britain.
Victor the electrician stood a little apart. Then they remembered him.
“This is Amy,” said Mrs. Todd with huge pride.
“Welcome to Australia,” said Amy. She had a warm smile.
Suddenly he wished he hadn’t made such firm arrangements about leaving Sydney to drive to the Outback. Sure it would be exciting, and that was one of the reasons he had come all this way. But Sydney looked as if it had a lot to offer as well. And he had only given himself three days to see it.
Amy showed them the city in style. She drove them over the famous Harbour Bridge and got them on a ferry to sail under it. She rightly regarded nothing as being too tiring or adventurous for her elderly grandmother.
She brought them to small restaurants where she knew the Greeks and Italians who ran the place. She liked that, it was all so international, she said.
“London’s getting like that too,” Victor said.
“Oh, London.” Amy shrugged.
“They’re not all like your father,” Victor said before he could stop himself.
But she only smiled.
“Just as well,” she said.
They had pretended to be old friends as a ruse to fool her father. Already they felt they were old friends.
He longed to give her a valentine’s card before he drove off across the bush, down the ribbon road that would take him past scrubland and ostriches. Amy had told him to be very careful of the kangaroos at sunset, they could jump out in front of the car. But Victor reminded himself of the many times his greetings had been misunderstood.
Perhaps there was a chocolate koala bear with hearts on it. But then, there was no point in sending a jokey thing; he couldn’t understand a whole industry based on that.
He wanted to say thank you for lighting up our lives. Why should it have to be dressed up as a joke?
He came to say good-bye, and Amy handed him a single red rose. There was a card on it: “I’ll miss you, Victor Valentine.”
When he could speak, he said, “I was thinking I needn’t stay away all that long.”
Amy said, “And I was thinking maybe we might come with you.”
CROSS LINES
Martin tapped his fingers in irritation on the phone. He was unsure of himself in his new and unfamiliar world of the arts where he was heading. There were already too many stresses involved in this whole business without having to part from Angie in such an un
In the next booth he saw one of those kind of career women he disliked on sight. Short practical hairdo, mannish suit, enormous briefcase, immaculate makeup, gold watch pinned to a severe lapel. She was making a heavy statement about being equal and coping in a man’s world. She was having a heated discussion with somebody on her telephone. Probably entirely unnecessary, shouting at someone for the sake of it. He would give Angie another three minutes and dial again. She had never been known to talk this long to anyone. And at nine-thirty A.M.
Kay wished the man in the next phone box would stop staring at her; she had enough to cope with with one of Henry’s tantrums. She had explained to Henry over and over how important it was for her to be at the trade fair a day in advance; that way she could supervise the setting up of the stand, make sure they had the right position, the one they had booked near the entrance, see that the lighting was adequate, decorate the booth, get to know the neighbors on her right and left so that she could rely on them and call on their support once the doors opened and the day’s business began.
Henry had said he understood, but that was yesterday; today he was in one of his moods.
Kay would be gone for five days; she hated leaving him like this, it was so uncalled for, he had nothing to fear from her trip to another town. She would be far too weary and exhausted to consider going out partying at the end of a long day; all she would want was a warm little telephone conversation every night, reassuring her that he loved her, that he was managing fine but not so fine as he managed when she was around and how he greatly looked forward to Friday. She had called him at the office to try to dispel his mood before it got a grip of him.