Free Maeve's Times by Maeve Binchy Page A

tell her about all that old thing about annulment costing a lot of money. Was that true these days?
    ‘Why don’t you just go and live in England for a bit and get a divorce?’ I asked, tough but practical.
    ‘It has to be an annulment or nothing,’ she said.
    It appeared that God would sanction an annulment and just about everything else, but not a horrible secular thing like a divorce.
    ‘Oh God, Lorraine,’ I said, ‘you are a fool.’
    And I know she’ll never speak to me again.

Women Are Fools – Sandy
9 May 1973
    S andy read Exodus when she was 18, about the same time as I did, but she read it in Yorkshire, and had married Johnny by the time she got to Israel. She believed that life was very commercial and rat race-ish in London and that in the orange groves and the purity of Israeli kibbutz life, they could really be both themselves and part of a greater movement. Johnny was easy going, he looked into the practicalities of the thing, and he decided that they would try it for a year or two anyway. He could always get a job in engineering again when they came back to London; it didn’t seem like a New Life, but if Sandy was so determined, there could be nothing lost. They bought eight good books on teaching yourself Hebrew, they bored a lot of their friends, with talk of going to a new land and a new life. They packed their two tiny children into a plane and went to the kibbutz.
    I saw them the day they arrived, pale and blonde and starry-eyed. They handed the two little boys over to the Children’s House and were given a bungalow to live in. They were told, as I had been, that the kibbutz could make no promises, if they were going to stay forever it would have to be by a vote from all the members. But then they didn’t have to spell it out so much for me, because I was going in September anyway, back to teaching. There were no problems in my case.
    And indeed there seemed to be none in Sandy’s either. That summer she became tanned and happy, she worked with me in the chicken house for a few weeks, we used to take day-old chicks and inject them against something, and we both cried the day that I choked one by mistake, because I held it too tightly, and Sandy was so soft that she buried it, instead of throwing it into the dustbin like the rest of them would have done.
    Johnny was working on the dam, we had all learned passable Hebrew, but Johnny was better because nobody at his end spoke any English at all.
    Their children were very happy. They were three and one, and the three-year-old was saying things in Hebrew to Sandy in one month, which excited her very much. She and Johnny were with them for five hours every day from two in the afternoon until seven, when they would put the baby to bed, and send little Tom to his tea. Nobody ever mentioned to any of us or to the children that we were any different to anyone else because we weren’t Jewish. We never thought about it ourselves anyway.
    And the long hot summer wore on and I was changed to making yoghurt from six a.m. until two instead of being in the chicken house, and Sandy was out picking grapes and got even browner and healthier, and she had a funny, happy smile, and a way of saying ‘Shalom’ to everyone with a grin that should have made us realise her happiness wasn’t going to last. But then why should it? I mean, what was wrong with the setup? They were a young couple in love and idealistic, and getting on well with everyone. Sandy didn’t look a fool at all. Compared to all her other friends, the working wives that she had left behind in London, she was in a paradise; no money worries, no health worries, near the sea, part of a commune.
    They weren’t my best friends there, but I missed them and thought about them a lot when I went home. No one is much good at letter writing on a kibbutz, and apart from a New Year’s card I never heard from them. The following summer when I got off the bus for my three months visit, they were all there,