Maeve's Times by Maeve Binchy Page B

even have to send her alimony because this time, she had married a near millionaire. He never spoke of her at all, or why they had separated. Mary had never asked.
    The summer holidays were coming up, and to get over the guilt feelings about Mother, Mary decided to get herself further in debt and take the two of them to Majorca. She wrote every day to tell him how she loved and missed him. He didn’t write at all, because her mother would probably ask who the letters were from. She admired his tact in not writing.
    Eventually the 14 days were over, and for appearances Mary stayed the night in her mother’s home, and then looked in at her false flat to make sure it hadn’t been broken into, and happily trotted up to the pad.
    He wouldn’t be home for ages, so she could make a great dinner. There was washing up in the sink, two of everything; he must have had Freddy to a meal. There was new talcum, and perfume in the bathroom, but they weren’t presents, they were half used. It couldn’t have been Freddy, he doesn’t use Blue Grass.
    The door opened and the Man came in, finding Mary sadly looking at a white dressing-gown on the back of the door. He had been coming back to clear up the evidence. They looked at each other, according to her own tale, for five minutes without saying anything, and then he had to say something and mercifully for Mary he didn’t say, ‘I can explain everything.’
    What he did say was, ‘Well, I suppose it had to end sometime.’
    She doesn’t know why he took someone else in, she doesn’t know who the other person is or was, or if they are still there. She just knew that life was over. She packed there and then, borrowing one of his suitcases, and saying, ‘Is this record yours or mine?’ He stood stonily, and she never spoke to him again. That was three years ago.
    Then Mary became known in the current attractive jargon of our times as ‘an easy lay’. She moved properly into what was her false flat and made it her real flat. She got drunk and told her mother all about the Man, her mother forbade her to come back again and told the priest, and Mary told her to keep to her lonely bitter ways, and hasn’t seen her mother properly for three years except at frosty Christmas lunches.
    She had a short affair, which by her standards now means a relationship that lasts a month or two, with the father of one of her pupils, and was sacked from the school. She got another job in a provincial town for a while, but didn’t even need to be sacked from that one because her poker playing, drinking and sleeping with the commercial travellers at the hotel made her a town name in three months.
    I met her at the races there a few weeks ago. I didn’t know her at first, but we met in the bar where I had lost my purse and it had been retrieved by an honest barman. She looked a little lost, and offered me a drink. I had people searching other corners of the race course for my purse so had to refuse but asked her to ring me during the Easter holidays, which she did.
    She is pregnant; she hasn’t a clue in the world who the father might be. You name him, it could be that person. It’s now too late for an abortion, she thinks, she doesn’t even damn know. She supposes she’ll have it, and get it adopted. Would I know where she could do that? I would.
    She also had a sort of half idea of keeping it, would I know how she could get help to do that? I would. What did I think about it all?
    Well, what on earth could I think, except that life is unfair as I think more and more these days, and wonder was it ever meant to be fair? It’s unfair on Mary’s child who isn’t wanted, it’s unfair on Mary’s mother who has no husband, and a daughter a nun in America, and a married son, and an emigrated son, and a daughter who is going to be a Public Disgrace. And it’s unfair on Mary because she had no strength, and she has this belief that a lot of women have that they don’t control their own lives. That