This new story, inspired by the friendships and intrigues of the annual Cumann Merriman summer school, is written by a real insider and devotee, Maeve Binchy
Do you know what I think should be banned? Those advertisements for cruise holidays for mature people. You get this suave man in a dinner jacket, hair lightly streaked with grey, looking into the eyes of a woman with a pashmina stole around her slim, firm shoulders, to protect her against the night breezes as they stand on deck together. There is a hint that they have been at it like knives all afternoon and that they can't wait for the captain's cocktail party and gala dinner to end, so they can be at it all over again.
Are there people like this or is it just a fantasy dreamed up by an advertising agency, to sell holidays to us middle-aged Americans? Something that will leave the rest of us unsettled and unhappy? In any event, it is not important; it's not relevant to us. We had never had a holiday. Not even when the girls, Mel and Margy, were children. Brian used to say, in his farming days: "Find me a cow that doesn't need to be milked for three weeks, and then we'll have a vacation."
And when the bottom fell out of the dairy- cattle market, as it did . . . for Brian, anyway . . . he was into growing corn in Illinois and flax in North Dakota, and in those days you couldn't take a vacation, either, because there was always something to be planted or watered or reaped or saved. And when the bottom had fallen out of flax and corn . . . for Brian, anyway . . . he studied mathematics and became a maths teacher.
Other teachers had vacations. In fact, people were always saying they met teachers on vacations. But not Brian, because there were papers to mark, or courses to do, or slow children to help, and he liked going up to the attic and writing little bits of poetry that he never showed to anyone. But anyway, what with all this . . . hey presto, the vacation was soon over.
Me? Oh, I have worked forever at the same thing. Like my mother before me, I bake things. I used to work as a patisserie chef in a big hotel, but when I met Brian I had to think up something a bit more mobile. Something that could move easily when he did. So I made cakes and casseroles and pies and delivered them to people's homes. I had to be ready to get up and go to the next place, so it was good to have a craft or trade or skill, whatever you might call it, to take with us.
People everywhere wanted to eat, and lots of the younger women couldn't cook. You'd be surprised how many deep-dish apple pies I made in their own pottery dishes. They even pretended to their husbands that they cooked them themselves. I had to be very careful about how and when I made my deliveries.
I could have taken a vacation on my own, I agree. There was nothing to stop me from going to Europe or the Grand Canyon. But that wasn't the point. I just wanted to travel with Brian, and he just didn't want to go anywhere at all. It wasn't just to say that I had been somewhere. I'm way too old for that. My customers who bought the deep-dish apple pie or the lamb stew wouldn't think more of me if I said I had been on a cruise to Alaska or on a train journey through Europe.
No, I wanted it for Brian and me. Something to remember. Something to look back on during the long evenings when we were on our own.
Mel and Margy were away a lot; there was always something for them to do during the summer holidays, when school term was finished. There was this camp and that camp; the children loved camp. And because we had moved so much and so often, we thought it best for the girls to go to a residential school. Give them more stability and enable them to keep their friends. And, heavens, they had so many friends.
A lot of these friends had parents who were much younger than us. We are conscious of being older parents. I mean, Brian was 40 when we married, and I was 38. We didn't want to seem too geriatric. All parents live on different planets from their children, they say, and, Lord, I've seen enough of it in the houses where I deliver food. But older parents? That's a solar system even farther away. Anyway, why should the girls hang out around our home, with Brian always so worried about everything, big lines of worry etched into his forehead, and me up to my elbows in pastry dough? Not much fun with us. And I remembered my own childhood. I didn't want to hang around my house when I was younger, either.
I could have gone away with my girlfriends. (All right: we were all in our 50s, but we will always think of ourselves as girls.) But I didn't want to spend our hard-earned money on a vacation with them. I wanted to be with Brian. I love Brian. I always have, since the day I met him, with his dreams and poetry and hopes of changing the world. It didn't matter that he didn't earn much of a living or that nobody rated him very highly. He was the man I wanted; always has been. I can just see him in a tuxedo, like the men in the advertisements. I can see us spending long afternoons in a bedroom, a cabin, a sleeping-car compartment. Wherever. I can see us exchanging a knowing glance that says there will be more of that later on. I'm not sure why I can see this so clearly, but somehow I can. And Brian needs a holiday even more these days. You see, he has just been suspended from his school. It's August now, and he hasn't any position for September, when the school year starts. A man of 57 without a job. And all because he had to speak his mind. And what's more, speak it at the parent-teacher association.
It was the occasion for congratulating the school for doing so well and for concentrating on the positive side of things. But my Brian had to choose the occasion to tell people that he did not think the war in Iraq was a just war. This was in a community that had lost two men already on active service in the Gulf. They didn't even wait until the next day to tell him that his services would no longer be needed. The head came round to our house and said he was sorry, feeling was running too high. "I'll only teach maths in future," poor Brian had promised. "Too late," the head said.
It hit Brian very hard. He didn't want me to tell the girls. "I don't mind you knowing that I'm an all-time loser," he pleaded, "but I don't want my daughters to know this. Not yet." But Mel and Margy would have to know come September, when Brian wasn't returning to school, I told him. "Hey, honey," he said. "They're not really all that interested in what I do or don't do. Just give me time, Kathleen, just give me a little time. I know I don't deserve it, but I can't breathe properly. This would give me some breathing space."
I don't know why I said it, but I did. "Right," I said. "I'll trade you. We have a vacation together - just one vacation - and then I'll give you time." He smiled a horrible smile, as if there was nothing behind it. As if he was an empty head. All the colour and life had gone from his face. "And maybe you'd have a check-up at the doctor's, too," I suggested. "Don't move the goalposts, Kathleen. A week in summer. You to organise it. That's the deal." He looked wretched. He didn't want a holiday. I loved him to bits. Maybe a kinder person would say forget the holiday. But somehow I thought it would be the making of us. "A week in summer, that's the deal," I said, and we linked little fingers, the way kids do. He never asked where we would go; he made no suggestions. His face was grey; his mind was miles away.
When the day came, he packed obediently and came with me to the airport as if it were a supermarket visit. No enthusiasm, no hope, nothing but a deal done, a trade agreed, a promise kept. I had told my customers that I would be away for a week. "A week in summer." I said it as if it were the most normal thing in the world. "Ireland? That's nice," they said without conviction. They would really have preferred me to stay where I was, making passion-fruit pavlovas on their family china for summer parties.
Brian was very quiet on the plane. He pretended to read the airline magazine, but he never turned a page. And then we were in Shannon airport. It was a bright, sunny day; the fields were small and green; the road signs were in two languages; the rented car was small.
Brian wasn't listening when they asked us who wanted to drive, so I said I would. I learned about the wrong side of the road and to beware leaving gas stations, and at roundabouts. And we set off. The other drivers on the road were, well, interesting, I suppose you'd call it. They never indicated or anything. They just pulled straight out in front of you. But once you got used to that . . .
I gave Brian the maps and the brochures, but they sat on his lap. In the middle of this lovely early-morning countryside I felt no joy of being on day one of a vacation. I got no feeling of having come home to my roots. I got no indication that this holiday would be the great breakthrough for us. The long, cramped sleepless night on the plane and these narrow windy roads were beginning to take their toll. "Tell me something about Lisdoonvarna," I said, with the false cheerfulness that I hate in others.
I could hear the tinny insecurity in my voice. I must have listened to a thousand of these non-conversations between husband and wife. The kind that ended up either as "Yes dear, yes dear" or "What do you know about that?"
Brian and I were never going to be anything like that. Surely. We had fought to get married. My family thought he was a slow starter with his head in the clouds. His family thought I was a bit too brittle and hard nosed for them. They didn't care that I supported him and put the girls through school. They would have liked a poet or a weaver or some damn thing.
But that had never mattered to Brian or me. We rose above it. We had so much going for us for years. But as we drove through the beautiful Co Clare countryside I thought that all we had going for us might have kept on going - and going, right away from us.
He opened a brochure and read to me obediently, like a child at school, about the Spa Wells and the curative water and the restorative baths. And there was a matchmaking festival in September. "Pity we'll miss that," I joked. "We might have found the love of our lives." "Nobody would blame you for leaving me, Kathy," he said, "nobody at all." I was busy trying to negotiate the Lycra-covered backsides of some cyclists who were hogging the road. It wasn't the moment to tell him that I had never loved anyone else and never would.
At the hotel in Lisdoonvarna they were very nice and welcoming. Cups of tea, congratulations on our having managed to drive there, first day in a new land. "You'll have a great week," the receptionist said. "But have a great rest now, after your long trip, and then you'll be in fine form for the fáiltiú." The fáiltiú. What, exactly, was that? She said it was the Irish for "welcome". That sounded familiar, though why people were going to welcome us was beyond belief.
But it wasn't us, it turned out. It was the start of a summer school of some sort. Everyone went to the fáiltiú, the receptionist said, reprovingly. We didn't want to be difficult, but what was it, exactly? She thought it might be a couple of glasses of wine and maybe some finger food. We'd have a great time. I looked at Brian's grey, empty face and doubted it but thanked her very much.
We went up, unpacked and lay beside each other in the big, cool bed. The unhappiest couple in the western world, and it was nobody's fault, really. That was the terrible thing. I sort of slept. I must have, because I dreamed of Margy and Mel when they were toddlers. They were asking me what was going to happen in life, and I was telling them it would all be great. I woke and found Brian sitting in a chair. His eyes were open, but he wasn't looking at anything.
It was 6pm, and, outside the window, people were heading down the road in the early-evening sunshine. They were old and young, men and women; they walked in twos and threes, on their own or in laughing groups. Heading towards the Spa Wells on a summer's evening to have a couple of glasses of wine and finger food. "Come on," I said. "We don't want to be late." "Late?" he replied, astounded.
Anything was better than a long night looking at each other with nothing left to say. Soon I was out of the shower and choosing which dress to wear. Some of the men walking down the road wore collars and ties; some had open shirts. Some of the ladies had cardigans; some had smart suits, flowery dresses; some were in jeans. It looked fairly free and easy.
"I don't know whether we should go to this thing, Kathy. We haven't been invited." "Oh, come on, Brian," I said. "Didn't you hear the lady at the desk? Everyone is invited." "We may have to pay," he said, sounding anxious. "So we pay," I told him. It was going to cost €120 each, we discovered, to sign on for the week. A bit expensive for a reception, all right, but I looked at the brochure. There were all kinds of things: lectures, poetry readings, bus trips, dancing lessons, seminars and debates. And, the main thing was, it would be a distraction. We wouldn't be left on our own, facing each other with nothing left to say and admitting the emptiness of our lives.
It wasn't tuxedos and leaning on the rail of a ship, but a lot of these people had fairly gamy eyes. You got a sense that there might have been a fair amount of jumping about in this lot. If not now, then in the past. They had all been coming here for years and years, apparently, to dance in squares and roam the countryside. They liked it so much they booked in again every year. It was all about Brian Merriman, some poet dead for hundreds of years, but people brought him back to life every summer.
Everyone was very friendly. They told us all sorts of things, like where to go for a swim, where to get cheap lobster, which translation of his poem Cúirt an Mheán Oíche to read. The poem wasn't even in English, for heaven's sake, but there seemed to be a rake of translations, and everyone recommended a different one. People were full of advice about everything. They said we should drive out and see the Burren - but not to pick the flowers - or maybe go to Doolin and get a boat to the Aran Islands, or go to places we had never heard of. Ballyvaughan, Ennistymon, Lahinch, Corofin: they tripped off the tongue. There were people speaking in the Irish language, which they told us we'd know in no time after a few lessons in the mornings.
So we listened to the opening of the school and to a lecture, and then we discovered that the theme of this year's gathering was marriage. They could have had something less brutally relevant, I thought, but I kept a bright smile, as if I hadn't a worry in the world about marriage and how it seemed to be panning out in our lives.
And then there was dancing. Mainly we couldn't do it at all, because there were complicated things much more intricate than our square dancing. Caledonian sets, Ballyvourney sets, all way, way beyond us. But apparently we could learn all that, too, in special dancing lessons every day. By the end of the week we would be whirling with the best. There were a few waltzes, so eventually Brian and I took to the floor like everyone else. Everyone in the hall sang the words. "My mother died last springtime, when Irish fields were green. The neighbours said her funeral was the finest ever seen." Brian listened in amazement. "Some topic for everyone to dance to," he said. But at least he was smiling, and I hadn't seen that for a while.
And so it went on for the week. We went to poetry readings and lectures. We learned about the construction of the Irish language at one seminar and about the courts of Munster poetry at another. We tried to keep up with horrifically fit dancing instructors, and soon we had our own eight and were swinging each other around in great style. We had conversations way into the night with poets, politicians and polka dancers.
If they asked us what we did, which was rarely, I told them I baked for people in their own dishes; Brian said he wrote poetry and had been doing some teaching on the side. Everyone seemed to think this was a completely reasonable thing to do. Nobody asked if there was money in it, or what he had published recently, or what his real job was, or what his 10-year plan was. I may have been imagining it, but, as the days went on, I thought that there were fewer lines etched on his face and that his eyes were brighter.
People kept assuring us that they were pacing themselves. They urged us to pace ourselves, too. This, I think, had to do with not staying up until 6am singing, which was a danger. And not starting to drink after the dancing class and forgetting to stop all day, which was another danger. And we heard amazing amounts of gossip. Things that happened some years back, when certain people had not been as wise as they were now or had more energy than they had now.
There was a story that at one summer school a man had lost his false teeth and asked rather sheepishly at reception if any had been handed in. He was discreetly given a set in an envelope. When they didn't fit he was told that all the other sets that had been lost and found had been claimed. Once upon a time another man had made so many perambulations to the rooms of different ladies that he never knew which was his own room, and when he went to pay his bill there was nothing to pay, because the hotel had assumed he was a no-show and had re-let it.
There was a marvellous woman who told us that it usually took her until November to recover from her indiscretions every third week of August. Another said regretfully that everyone was very old and staid and settled now and that it was a pity we hadn't met them in their heyday. They looked very much in their heyday to us. A great roaming band of people, old and young, serious drinkers and teetotallers, fit as fiddles or bent over canes, long retired or in their first jobs. Some went to every lecture, took notes and asked questions. Others adjourned to bars, golf courses, lunches in craft shops.
They talked about any number of subjects: the nature of evil, the joys and problems of being part of a united Europe, the wisdom or lack of it in having a celibate clergy. And because of the theme we discussed marriage at length: whether it was possible to have an equal partnership, what equal meant, whether it could last forever and whether it should last forever. My head was in a whirl.
As for Brian Merriman himself! They all talked about him so familiarly that I would not have been surprised to hear that he was up at the Roadside Inn, singing songs, and that we should hurry, in case we missed him. It was a mystery. At home we didn't have gatherings like this. Or maybe we did, and Brian and I had never came across them. These people had come from all over the country, and even farther afield, for this celebration. Their conversation was full of "Do you remember?"s and "Aren't you looking like a two-year-old?"s. I forgot all about looking for my roots. There wasn't time, anyway. The Collins family tree would have to wait for another visit.
The man who ran the summer school was actually called Collins - Bob Collins - a very nice man, approachable when he was free. But he was always talking to someone very important, like a former prime minister of Ireland or an ex-president who had a holiday home down the road.
If some of the social climbers I make carrot cake for back at home only knew the high society we were mixing with. They would be pea green with envy. I did get to talk to him. I told him that I was a Collins, too, and was wondering where I should start to research the clan. He gave me all kinds of places to start, but, of course, there wasn't one moment left to do any of it.
"Kathleen Collins? You have the same name as Brian Merriman's wife," he said. I don't really believe any of this fate or coincidence thing, though you'd be surprised how many of my clients back home consult psychics. They're always talking about them. That evening Brian suggested we go out for an hour and watch the sunset. I wish I could tell you how unusual this was in our lives. If ever I suggested a sunset, he would say bleakly: "So the sun goes down and it comes up again. That's what happens."
"You're very restful, Kathy," he said. "I feel I could tell you anything, even something so mad you won't believe it." "Tell me," I said, without an idea of what he was going to say. "I think we were led here in some way," he said. "I think I am the reincarnation of Brian Merriman." My heart sank. I thought he was getting better, the depression was lifting, the clouds were parting, and instead he was coming out as clinically mad. "The what?" I asked. "You know, Kathy, the way they say things don't really die, they come back again. I have come back again. It's as simple as that." He beamed at me like a complete madman. "How, exactly, a reincarnation?" I asked, hoping I didn't sound too like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
"Don't you see?" he said, his eyes blazing happily in the sunset. "My name is Brian Merman; his wife was Kathleen Collins; we have had exactly the same career, married at the same age as he did; they had two daughters, like we do; he was a flax farmer and won prizes for growing it; I did, too, in Dakota, remember? And, of course, he was a teacher, like me, and, most of all - and here's the whole centre of it - he wrote poetry."
I nodded dumbly. Was this the time to tell him that when his grandfather had come to the United States from Russia, Merman was as near as Americans could come to pronouncing the family name? No, it was probably not the time. Anyway, I wouldn't have got a word in. He was going on and on: they were born exactly 200 years apart yet had followed the same path; the first Brian Merriman had been impatient about clergy and the Establishment, just as my Brian had been. It had to mean something. Something amazing. Something very significant.
He hadn't looked so young and hopeful for as long as I could remember. He said that he was going to show people his poetry, that he wasn't going to keep it hidden. It had been the sign he needed, something to prove he wasn't worthless. His arm was around my shoulder, his face nuzzling my cheek in a way it hadn't done for some considerable time. The gamy look of a Merriman was in his eye. What the hell, I thought. I know what's changed him: he met a marvellous band of good-natured people who lived life to the full. If he thinks he's the reincarnation of some guy who walked these roads 200 years ago, then I'm going to let him think it. And we would come back here next year. Of course we would.
I only know four figures of one Clare set. There is much still to learn. Brian has only read one translation of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche. We have only skimmed the surface of Clare music and got the barest essentials of dolmens, holy wells and the lunar landscape of the Burren. Imagine leaving all these people and not knowing how their lives turned out. It's more than flesh and blood could bear.
Anyway, this coming back as a butterfly or something else is a perfectly decent theory. Buddhists believe it, and they are gentle people. And, just as there are strong women in the famous poem, I have met many strong women here. Surely one of them will get a summer school going on Mrs Merriman, on Kathleen Collins - quite possibly my ancestor. I might be her reincarnation, too. And if she makes me as happy as her husband has made Brian, then we won't be doing badly at all.