Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy Page B

about them, your girlfriend would.
       When I started working for his family firm, Max always admired the way I built up my side of the business: the art tours, the painting classes and the ladies' bridge clubs or reading groups. But he admired this and indeed admired me very distantly and objectively.
       You see, looking back on it all, Max never really loved me, not loved the way people write about and sing about and dream about. I never thought that he loved anyone else. I told myself that possibly he didn't have a high sex drive, not like Malka's husband sure did over in Ireland. No, I was sure that he didn't love anyone else, he just thought of what we had as a sort of business partnership. That's the way he was made.
       For a while I thought that if I tried harder, dressed better, got thinner, developed more sparkle, he would grow to love me. But oddly it was my friend Malka who convinced me that this was not really the way it worked. Otherwise all thin, groomed, sparkly people would be very happy, and we all knew—because we saw them all around us—that most of them were totally miserable.
       And Malka told me I was a scream, and as bright as a button, and sharp as a tack, and a dozen other insane Irish phrases, and I started believing it all and became unreasonably confident about almost everything. And I was happy, most of the time, when I look back on it.
       I wasn't happy in those years when my mom was on my case, screeching at me about getting married. And there was that time when I was wearing myself out, eating nothing and putting in a ten-hour day at the office followed by social functions: I wasn't happy then.
       But when Lida was born, my beautiful, beautiful daughter, I was happy then, and never stopped being happy. And I had a notebook where I wrote down all the things my mom had done to irritate me and break my heart, and I tried not to do any of them myself.
       But the world had changed.
       Imagine my asking Lida to consider her marriage options before she lost her looks.
       I mean, imagine it! It would be like living on a different planet.
       And oddly, my mom had changed around that time too, she became normal and knew a lot of the world's wisdom. She certainly had not been normal or wise when I was young and needed it, still it was nice that she had discovered it in later life.
       Malka said the same thing about her mother too, that she had calmed down since she had a grandchild. But I had never thought that Mrs. O'Brien was all that bad. Very superstitious, of course, and caring about what other people in Rossmore thought or would say, like all people of her age. But basically a nice person.
       Yet Malka said Mrs. O'Brien had been really terrible when she was younger, so I guess that generation just improved with age.
       Malka's little boy, Brendan, was a sweetheart, which was just as well, since her husband turned out to be a lot less than we had all hoped he would be. I loved it when she brought Brendan over to stay with me for a few weeks that time, the time that Declan, the roving husband, had roved off with Eileen the school secretary. Malka was very depressed when she arrived at first, she cried a lot. She said she hadn't cried back home—she wouldn't give her sistersin-law or her own mother the satisfaction of seeing her down. But she cried in my kitchen, and in my garden as we watched our children playing in the pool, and she cried when we went out to a bar one evening, she and I, and the pianist played "Blue Moon," which had been their song, hers and Declan's.
       "I never thought he'd fancy another woman," she wept. "He always said I was the only one. I thought that if I ever lost him it would be to the drink, I believed it was a battle between Callaghan's licensed premises and myself for his attention."
       I patted her hand in the bar, and passed her tissues. This was not the time to tell Malka that her intended had hit on me three