A Few of the Girls: Stories Read online

  Catherine thought for a moment. Perhaps Margie wouldn’t mind all that much if she didn’t go to see her today. There was no hard-and-fast rule that she must turn up every Sunday. Margie was so easy to please, just a telephone call and some explanation, and she would agree to the visit being canceled.

  “It’s nothing very concrete with my sister,” she said, feeling a little treacherous, “no, nothing that can’t keep. Let’s meet for lunch.”

  “Are you sure your sister wouldn’t like to come, too?” he asked.

  “She’s miles away, she’d hate to make the journey,” said Catherine, and they fixed to meet in a pub.

  “I know a nice place for lunch,” he said, which was more than Catherine did. Nobody who lived in London knew where to go for Sunday lunch.

  He said he was tall and would carry The Sunday Times, and she said she was small and dark and would carry the same thing. All giggles, overexcited and overtired, she rang Margie at the hotel.

  “Something’s come up, love,” she said. “I can’t make it. I was just ready to leave, and I have your sweater finished. Next Sunday without fail.”

  “Right,” said Margie glumly.

  “You’re not upset? I really have to meet this man from America; he’s a friend of Suzi’s and he has nowhere to go.”

  “I’ve nowhere to go,” said Margie.

  “I know, Margie, but you’re there, and you have all your friends. He has nobody.”

  “I have nobody on a Sunday either,” said Margie.

  “Nobody has anybody on a Sunday,” cried Catherine in exasperation. Why, oh why, of all days, could Margie not be sunny and cheerful? Why must it be today that she was low?

  “Could you bring him here for lunch?” asked Margie. “You could book a table and we could all have lunch in the dining room. I’m allowed to do that you know, on Sundays, if there are guests.”

  “No, he has to stay in the center of town,” lied Catherine. “Listen, I’ll give you a ring later tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Margie doubtfully.

  Catherine changed her clothes; she put on the good leather coat and nice tartan skirt, she put on makeup, and splashed on her best perfume. She spent so long doing it that she had to take a taxi to the pub. She recognized him at once, tousle-haired, intense, reading The Sunday Times, looking sensitive.

  “Bob?” she said confidently, disturbing him from his half pint and his reading.

  “No, but I wish I was,” he said in a Geordie accent.

  Annoyed, Catherine went to the bar and sat on a stool.

  “A large vodka and ice,” she said to the barman.

  “On no sleep?” asked the elderly man beside her, a man whom she hadn’t noticed before.

  “I’m Bob Dane, Catherine,” he said, like a family doctor who had been asked to take someone away quietly to the asylum without upsetting the neighbors. “I’m very pleased to know you. Shall we take our drinks to that corner over there?”

  He was in his late sixties, at least. Damn him, damn him, why did he have to pretend to be young, and eligible, and some kind of Lancelot to her on the phone? He was an old, old man.

  She hadn’t even taken in his name.

  “My little Suzi said that I mustn’t leave London without seeing you and I’m very glad we’re seeing each other,” he said, carrying the drinks to the table he had pointed out.

  His name registered.

  “You’re Suzi’s…?” she asked.

  “I’m Suzi’s father,” he said.

  “I didn’t even know she had one. I hardly know her, you know,” gasped Catherine.

  “We’re not very close. Suzi lives her life; I live mine. Since Suzi’s mother died, when she was eighteen, she’s been very much her own person,” said the man. “I’m not surprised you didn’t know of me. In fact, we’ve only got together recently. I was quite shy of approaching her. But now we meet like friends, and as you so rightly said, Suzi has a lot of friends. She likes them. She regards me as an interesting new addition to her collection.”

  Catherine drank most of her vodka.

  “How about the sleeping?” he asked kindly.

  “I did what you said. I stayed out of bed since midnight on Friday. My legs and back feel tired but the rest of me is awake.”

  “You’ll sleep tonight,” he said positively.

  Catherine nodded. “I’m sure I will.”

  There was a silence.

  “You said something about wanting to go to St. Paul’s, Catherine, so I took a little liberty. I packed a picnic, it’s such a lovely day I thought we might eat it on the steps, or nearby.”

  Catherine looked at him, a nice confident face, gray hair, light tan, heavy gold ring on his finger. He was a successful retired American businessman and there seemed no reason to hurt him—he didn’t look like someone who would hurt her.

  “A picnic would be lovely,” said Catherine.

  “You mustn’t feel that you have to take back anything you said about Suzi to me on the phone,” he said, just as Catherine was wondering how she might possibly do this. “I know only too well what a burden some of her lame dogs can be. I had a great hesitancy about calling you because of this. I felt sure you had been stuck with Chuck and Mitzi among others.”

  “Well, yes,” agreed Catherine, laughing.

  “Yet we mustn’t be too hard on Suzi. She has this odd cosmic theory that the people of the world should all get to know each other, and that some of us are too timid to go up and say hi, therefore an introduction helps.”

  “Oh, in theory she’s right,” agreed Catherine enthusiastically. “I suppose, selfishly, I feel it’s all one-way traffic. You see, I don’t know anyone going to the United States much, so I don’t send my friends to her.”

  “I know. I understand that, but you must never underestimate Suzi. She may indeed be overbusy, oversuccessful, and very haphazard about who she deposits on whom, yet she does care about people It’s not just a wish to be at the center of some web, you know.”

  “Oh, I never thought that,” cried Catherine insincerely.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” said Bob gravely. And Catherine knew he saw through her.

  They walked in the autumn lunchtime sun to the steps of St. Paul’s; it had become autumn overnight. Catherine didn’t need to do her guide-to-London act, because Bob had obviously been to Britain several times. It turned out that he was a doctor, but he had retired earlier and organized medical conferences instead. He was in Europe a great deal.

  “Why didn’t Suzi ever give you my address before?” asked Catherine.

  “Well, as I said, we’ve only been close in the last couple of years.”

  “But since then?” she persisted.

  “Oh, I don’t think she thought the time was ripe,” he said mysteriously.

  They walked around the building, they chatted to each other amicably about Wren, and what he thought he was at, and what other people thought of him in his time. Bob told her about the cathedral at Rheims, which was overpowering in its detail, and about temples in Salt Lake City, which were equally startling. They both felt they could cope with St. Paul’s.

  As they had their picnic he told her about a woman he had loved once. When Suzi’s mother died, he had contacted her again and the woman told him to get lost. He said it was hurtful to be told that at fifty you were finished and no use to anybody; he had been very lost in those days, but now, at sixty-four, somehow he felt more secure. He said he didn’t feel old enough to have a daughter of thirty-two, and that when he heard of the older generation he never included himself in that category at all.

  Catherine told him how she had been in love for three years and only very recently had stopped. She said she tried hard not to feel bitter but this man had really hurt her a lot, and it was hard to take up the reins again.

  The evening shadows came and they talked, and then they walked along the Embankment, and she told him more, about how she couldn’t sleep because she kept wondering did othe
r people manage relationships better than she did. She had worked out one day that she was happy twenty percent of the time with this man and decided that it wasn’t enough so she had ended it. He had been surprised and annoyed. She had liked him feeling that way.

  But sometimes, as she was going to sleep alone, she wondered about the rest of the world. Perhaps twenty percent was average for happiness with another human being. Maybe she had wanted too much and didn’t know how to compromise. What did Bob think? How much happiness had he enjoyed with Suzi’s mother, say?

  “Oh, about ninety percent,” he said. “You were right to finish with Alec. What we must do is make sure that the cure isn’t worse than the disease.”

  “I didn’t say his name, how did you know?” asked Catherine. She made a point of not mentioning Alec’s name, ever. It made him seem like more of a person if his name was allowed to occur in conversation.

  “Suzi told me,” he said calmly.

  “But how could Suzi possibly know? I send her a Christmas card once a year. I send her a note of three lines thanking her for whatever she has sent me by one of her ghastly friends. I never mentioned Alec to her, not once. I haven’t seen Suzi for ten years. Nobody ever seems to believe that.”

  “Chuck told her,” said Bob.

  Chuck? Chuck! The man with the smelly socks and no money; the man who had eaten the jar of ginger, the man who met Alec twice. How dare Chuck mention Alec’s name at the other side of the world? She was speechless with rage and shock.

  “Chuck told Suzi that it was a bad scene, and Suzi asked me to see if I could help you straighten your problems out. I guess I arrived just in time. At least I’m able to fix your sleeping problems. That’s better than talking you out of Alec.”

  “You couldn’t have talked me out of Alec, nobody could,” Catherine said, stunned by his intrusion and confidence. “I don’t know what makes you and Suzi think you have any right to interfere in other people’s affairs. People you don’t even know. It’s outrageous!”

  “Yeah, but you were agreeing earlier that we are all too buttoned up about getting to know people, the British particularly.”

  “But it’s my business, nobody else’s.”

  “Your friends care,” said Bob simply.

  “You’re not my friend. Suzi’s not my friend. I’ve no friends who care.”

  “Margie might care if you talked to her about it,” said Bob.

  Catherine felt weak at her thighs, as if she were going to fall. She didn’t know whether it was tiredness or the sense of unreality. How did this old, old American man know about Margie? She never told people about Margie, only Alec had known, for all the good he had been.

  “Mitzi mentioned to Suzi that you had a sister who was a problem to you. She said she was in a hotel somewhere and you were ashamed to include her in your life. That’s why I was so anxious we should meet her today and talk, all three of us.”

  Yes, Mitzi had been told about Margie. That’s because Mitzi had stayed three weeks in Catherine’s flat, and had asked where she went every Sunday. God damn Mitzi and Suzi and whatever other transatlantic spies she had harbored.

  They were passing a seat and Catherine sat down. Bob talked on in his calm voice. “I’ve rented a car; we could ride out and see your sister. I could act as an intermediary, you and she could discuss how she could participate more in your life. You would feel the benefit, she would feel the benefit.”

  Catherine spoke slowly and carefully. “I know you mean well. I know Suzi means well. I know Americans are thicker-skinned than we are; they are also more friendly and they risk insult more easily out of kindness. I also know it’s foolish to make generalizations about my nationality. Now given all this, can I thank you for your interest, and walk back to a bus stop with you, and part friends in some sort of way? I won’t begin to tell you how impossible I would find it to thrash out my whole life and problems with a stranger, however kind.”

  “But you were very frank about your relationship with Alec.”

  “Because I thought you were someone who hadn’t much interest and whom I would never meet again!” said Catherine desperately.

  “You mean you’d prefer to talk to someone who could be of no help?” asked Bob.

  “I don’t want help,” she said, choked.

  “You do, my dear Catherine, you do, you’re just afraid to admit it. This British reserve may have got you all through national crises but it’s no good for a young girl all by herself.”

  “Please don’t say any more,” begged Catherine.

  On shaking legs she rose and ran haltingly down the Embankment towards a bus stop. Behind her, Bob was calling, “Catherine, Catherine, we must talk, you need to talk.” Behind her, St. Paul’s towered knowingly over it all.

  Someone’s Got to Tell Her

  Oh, we could tell each other anything when we were fifteen, Angela! Couldn’t we? You and Maggie and I. You two could tell me that white lipstick was tarty. We two could tell you that the short skirt gave you thunder thighs. We could both tell Maggie that the frizzy perm didn’t work. We were always together, Maggie, Angela, and Deirdre. They used to call us MAD back then. We thought it was a scream.

  And when we got a bit older we could tell each other almost anything. Like we told Maggie that the fellow Liam she was seeing was also seeing a lot of other people. We only told her because she was actually starting to talk about weddings and we couldn’t let her go down that road.

  And we told you that your boss Eric that you fancied was a con man. And we had to tell you because you were about to invest all your savings in some scam. And you both told me to go back home and live with my mam because my lovely bedsit that I was so proud of was actually a room in a brothel.

  And back then we never really minded being told that we were wrong or foolish or silly or whatever. We didn’t like it now, but we didn’t get upset or sulk or anything. It was what friends did for each other. So why has it become so difficult now that we are twenty-eight?

  It’s not that twenty-nine is old. Or that the dreaded thirty is creeping up on us…We’ve lost something along the way. I don’t know what happened, but we seem to be walking on eggshells with each other. And there’s no reason for it.

  We’ve all done fine. Well, as regards work anyway. Not quite so well in the Men Department. But then, people marry much later nowadays. And some don’t marry at all.

  It’s not like it was back in our mothers’ time where they still had the notion of being old maids or spinsters or whatever. And of course we’d all like to have children, but when we’re ready. Not like half the kids we were at school with who had kids of their own just to get out and have a flat, and now they’re tied down and can’t go anywhere.

  And I mean, you have to admit we’re not doing badly. You run a hair salon on your own. And you go out to movie sets and meet the stars and do their hair. You have your picture taken with them. That’s pretty good, Angela, by anyone’s standards.

  And I’m doing okay as well. Nobody in my family had even heard of a career in marketing, and yet here I am in a consultancy doing very nicely thank you. Away long from the classroom when poor Miss O’Sullivan said that we would all end up in the gutter because we had no get-up-and-go.

  And of course Maggie’s doing fine too. In a way. You know. Considering everything.

  And really her family was much more difficult than ours were so she more or less had to help out all the time. And she couldn’t get any real money together for a training course like we did. When we all worked stacking shelves and serving tables, back then. And honestly, Ange, we did try to tell her.

  Remember when we said we’d all stand up to her father when he came down to take her wages from her? We said we’d speak to him straight out and tell the authorities that he was taking every penny his daughter slaved hard for, but Maggie begged us not to, said it would be worse for her mother if we did.

  So we did nothing.

  And then when her mother got sick Maggie sa
id she had to stay at home and mind the younger ones. Who else was there?

  And we did say to each other then that someone should tell her we didn’t get all that many chances in life and she should have gone to college. She was brighter than all of us. She could easily have got a place.

  But would she listen?

  Instead it was all this about the young ones wetting the bed, what with her mother being so long in hospital, and her father being so drunk. And somebody had to be there and do it and she was there and did it.

  I mean, Maggie’s marvelous, and what she did for those sisters and brothers was fantastic. Some of them are actually in college now. And she was tough, too. She got her father into some alcoholics’ program and he did stop eventually, I think. Didn’t he?

  Anyway, it was all too late for Maggie and somebody should have told her that it’s not so easy to go back to studying when you’re older. And they want babes, nowadays, not mature women. But it was getting harder to talk to her. All the old easy feeling had gone.

  And that’s what has her where she is now. Not that there’s anything wrong with it; working in a tacky kind of shop like that, selling all kinds of rubbish. But you know the way Maggie goes on. It’s lovely. She meets great people, they get marvelous bargains, it’s near home, one of the younger sisters has asthma or something and she likes to put a good meal on the table for her father. And honestly, she doesn’t seem to remember that we are all out for each other’s good. And that since we were the group they called MAD back at school, there was literally nothing we couldn’t say to each other.

  You get the feeling she’s become touchy.

  We never did touchy before, did we? But I didn’t like the way she reacted when I offered to give her my old jacket. It was a million times better than anything she had. A million. But Maggie said she wouldn’t have a call to wear it. What a strange phrase, instead of saying thank you and being delighted with it. Like we all would. If we were in a position to, I mean.

  And remember that time we went to have lunch with her in the posh hotel. It was almost embarrassing. Well, it wasn’t really embarrassing, what with her being Maggie and everything. But she seemed so out of place and asking could she take home the little sugar packets and paper napkins with the name of the place on them to her sisters. They were giving us such pitying looks. Did you notice?