Free Maeve's Times by Maeve Binchy

and wear glamorous nightgowns, she just decided that it was all over and assessed the whole situation over a lonely cup of instant coffee in the kitchen one morning. If he was having fun, well so would she.
    She picked on the most unlikely man in the world. A quiet, rather inarticulate man who had a fairly happy home life, and she just set herself at him. He had vague connections with libraries and publishing so she played up all she knew about the pathetic little holiday job she had a hundred years ago it seems, and assumed an interest in all his work. It took six weeks, they tell me, before he gave in. Then they started hiring rooms for the afternoon in Dublin hotels, and she just felt she was getting back at Martin, and he felt desperately worried in case someone might tell his wife.
    ‘Pure playboy’ we decided at this stage, because you see no one was very fond of Lorraine, and no one could understand her motives. It went on for about a year. If anyone thought anything I suppose it was about how dreadful it must have been for the children. Mummy with a worried man, Daddy with an out-and-out chancer. But anyway none of us had enough courage or interest to say Stop.
    And it stopped when the out-and-out chancer found someone else richer, freer, and more fun. And Martin wanted a bit of home life and it just wasn’t around. And about six months later the quiet, inarticulate man took a job about a thousand miles from here, to get out of the situation, and brought his fairly happy wife with him, and there they were. Mutually suspicious, and deeply unhappy.
    To this day I don’t know what Martin does with his life. I don’t really care because I never got to know him, but I care a bit, I suppose, because I see what a failure he and Lorraine made of the whole thing, the whole business that was meant to be sickness and health, in good times and bad times. I just see what had happened to her at the age of 32.
    She is probably the best-known easy lay in Dublin. You only have to be nice to her, if you are a man, and she will get a little drunk and a little emotional, and say that God was very unfair when He made the world, and go home to bed with you.
    It didn’t come home to me until a few months ago when a friend, a good friend of mine, said he had got himself stupidly involved with a very clinging woman, and she kept ringing him indiscreetly at his office. He was trying to get out of it, but she seemed so dependent and she seemed to have nothing to live for, and she was deeply religious, and guilty, and he wondered what the hell he should do.
    I knew it was Lorraine because I had seen them talking in a pub one day and knew that this is a village, not a capital city, and that it was the latest of her ‘involvements’. All right, what should I do, women are fools. Should I go out to her house and say this guy has a good job and a good wife and stop bothering him? Should I tell him to choke her off, and have her eventual breakdown on my neck? Should I ask Martin out to dinner and say, ‘You’re both young still, can’t you make a new start?’
    I did one thing. I had a party and asked a priest, and got him talking to Lorraine. I eavesdropped every few minutes and they seemed to be getting on fine. He was saying things like ‘Your teenage children will need you now more than ever’ and she was saying, ‘I know, I know, but I feel so dishonest and neglectful, how can I ever re-establish something?’ And I felt like some kind of Solomon. That evening anyway.
    But she didn’t stop her way of life. As I write she is involved with a boy, and I mean boy, of 22 who keeps ringing me and saying things like ‘That brute of a husband ill-treats her and how do you get an annulment in this country?’ And I don’t know what to say.
    And last week she rang me up and said that she would be very grateful if I could ask someone what that priest meant on television when he said that Marriage was dead when Love was dead, and could I