A Week in Summer: A Short Story by Binchy Maeve

Author:Binchy, Maeve [Binchy, Maeve]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307957269
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

We discovered that it was going to cost €120 each to sign up for the summer school’s week of activities. A bit expensive for a welcome reception, I thought, but then 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, forced to admit the emptiness of our lives.

It wasn’t men in tuxedos and women in gowns leaning on a ship’s railing, but a lot of these people had fairly playful eyes. You got a sense that there might be a fair amount of flirting in this lot, if you know what I mean. 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 stack of translations of The Midnight Court, 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 at home. 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 neighbors said her funeral was the finest ever seen.” Brian listened in amazement. “Some topic for everyone to dance to,” he said.

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